g to have this made public before I
had my case worked up."

"Then there's no extra!"

He flung down his pencil and sprang up. "Nothing doing, Billy," he
called to Harper, who that instant opened the door; "go on back with
you." He began to walk up and down the little office, scowling, hands
clenched in his trousers' pockets. After a moment he stopped short,
and looked at Katherine half savagely.

"I suppose you don't know what it means to a newspaper man to have a
big story laid in his hands and then suddenly jerked out?"

"I suppose it is something of a disappointment."

"Disappointment!" The word came out half groan, half sneer. "Rot! If
you were waiting in church and the bridegroom didn't show up, if you
were----oh, I can't make you understand the feeling!"

He dropped back into his chair and scratched viciously at the copy
paper with his heavy black pencil. She watched him in a sort of
fascination, till he abruptly looked up. Suspicion glinted behind the
heavy glasses.

"Are you sure, Miss West," he asked slowly "that this whole affair
isn't just a little game?"

"What do you mean?"

"That your whole story is nothing but a hoax? Nothing but a trick to
get out of a tight hole by calling another man a thief?"

Her eyes flashed.

"You mean that I am telling a lie?"

"Oh, you lawyers doubtless have a better-tasting word for it. You
would call it, say, a 'professional expedient.'"

She was still not sufficiently recovered from her astonishment to be
angry. Besides, she felt herself by an unexpected turn put in the
wrong regarding Bruce.

"What I have said to you is the absolute truth," she declared. "Here
is the situation--believe me or not, just as you please. I ask you,
for the moment, to accept the proposition that my father is the victim
of a plot to steal the water-works, and then see how everything fits
in with that theory. And bear in mind, as an item worth considering,
my father's long and honourable career--never a dishonouring word
against him till this charge came." And she went on and outlined, more
fully than on yesterday before her father, the reasoning that had led
her to her conclusion. "Now, does not that sound possible?" she
demanded.

He had watched her with keen, half-closed eyes.

"H'm. You reason well," he conceded.

"That's a lawyer's business," she retorted. "So much for theory. Now
for facts." And she continued and gave him her experience of half an
hour before with Blake