ny old palm.

"And while you're quietly turning this little trick," he chuckled,
"the Honourable Harrison Blake will be carefully watching every move
of Elijah Stone, the best hippopotamus in the sleuth business, and be
doing right smart of private snickering at the simplicity of
womankind."

She flushed, but added soberly:

"Of course it's only a plan, and it may not work at all."

They talked the scheme over in detail. At length, shortly before the
hour at which the afternoon express from the East was due to arrive,
Katherine retired to her own office. Half an hour later, looking down
from her window, she saw the old surrey of Mr. Huggins' draw up beside
the curb, in it a quietly dressed, middle-aged passenger who had the
appearance of a solid man of affairs. He crossed the sidewalk and a
little later Katherine heard him enter Old Hosie's office on the floor
below. After a time she saw the stranger go out and drive around the
Square to the Tippecanoe House, Peck's hotel, where Katherine had
directed that Mr. Manning be sent to facilitate his being detected by
the enemy.

Her plan laid, Katherine saw there was little she could do but await
developments--and in the meantime to watch Blake, which Mr. Mannings'
role would not permit his doing, and to watch and study Doctor
Sherman. Despite this new plan, and her hopes in it, she realized that
it was primarily a plan to defeat Blake's scheme against the city. She
still considered Doctor Sherman the pivotal character in her father's
case; he was her father's accuser, the man who, she believed more
strongly every day, could clear him with a few explanatory words. So
she determined to watch him none the less closely because of her new
plan--to keep her eyes upon him for signs that might show his
relations to Blake's scheme--to watch for signs of the breaking of his
nerve, and at the first sign to pounce accusingly upon him.

When she reached home that afternoon she found Bruce awaiting her.
Since morning, mixed with her palpitating love and her desire to see
him, there had been dread of this meeting. In the back of her mind the
question had all day tormented her, should she, for his own interests,
send him away? But sharper than this, sharper a hundredfold, was the
fear lest the difference between their opinions should come up.

But Bruce showed no inclination to approach this difference. Love was
too new and near a thing for him to wander from the present. For this