she doing in New York? Practising law?"

"No. She's working for an organization something like Doctor
Sherman's--The Municipal League, I think she called it."

"Huh!" grunted Bruce. "Well, whatever she's like, it's a pretty mess
she's coming back into!"

With that the editor pulled his hat tightly down upon his forehead and
strode out of the Court House and past the speakers' stand, across
whose front twin flags were being leisurely festooned. Back in his own
office he picked up the story he had finished an hour before. With a
sneer he tore it across and trampled it under foot. Then, jerking a
chair forward to his typewriter, his brow dark, his jaw set, he began
to thump fiercely upon the keys.

CHAPTER III

KATHERINE COMES HOME

Next morning when the Limited slowed down beside the old frame
station--a new one of brick was rising across the tracks--a young
woman descended from a Pullman at the front of the train. She was
lithe and graceful, rather tall and slender, and was dressed with
effective simplicity in a blue tailored suit and a tan straw hat with
a single blue quill. Her face was flushed, and there glowed an
expectant brightness in her brown eyes, as though happiness and
affection were upon the point of bubbling over.

Standing beside her suit-case, she eagerly scanned the figures about
the station. Three or four swagger young drummers had scrambled off
the smoker, and these ambassadors of fashion as many hotel bus drivers
were inviting with importunate hospitality to honour their respective
board and bed. There was the shirt-sleeved figure of Jim Ludlow,
ticket agent and tenor of the Presbyterian choir. And leaning
cross-legged beneath the station eaves, giving the effect of
supporting the low roof, were half a dozen slowly masticating, soberly
contemplative gentlemen--loose-jointed caryatides, whose lank
sculpture forms the sole and invariable ornamentation of the facades
of all Western stations. But nowhere did the young woman's expectant
eyes alight upon the person whom they sought.

The joyous response to welcome, which had plainly trembled at the tips
of her being, subsided, and in disappointment she picked up her bag
and was starting for a street car, when up the long, broad platform
there came hurrying a short-legged little man, with a bloodshot,
watery eye. He paused hesitant at a couple of yards, smiled
tentatively, and the remnant of an old glove fumbled the brim of a
rumpled, semi