news and
editorial character collapsed. This last she could hardly understand,
for Billy Harper was in charge, and Bruce had often praised him to her
as a marvel of a newspaper man. But one evening, when she was coming
home late from Elsie Sherman's and hurrying through the crowd of Main
Street, Billy Harper lurched against her. The next day, with a little
adroit inquiry, she learned that Harper, freed from Bruce's
restraining influence, and depressed by the general situation, was
drinking constantly. It required no prophetic vision for Katherine to
see that, if things continued as they now were going, on the day Bruce
came out of jail he would find the _Express_, which he had lifted to
power and a promise of prosperity, had sunk into a disrepute and a
decay from which even so great an energy as his could not restore it.

Since there was so little she could do elsewhere, Katherine was at the
Shermans' several times a day, trying in unobtrusive ways to aid the
nurse and Doctor Sherman's sister. Miss Sherman was a spare, silent
woman of close upon forty, with rather sharp, determined features.
Despite her unloveliness, Katherine respected her deeply, for in other
days Elsie had told her sister-in-law's story. Miss Sherman and her
brother were orphans. To her had been given certain plain virtues, to
him all the graces of mind and body. She was a country school-teacher,
and it had been her hard work, her determination, her penny-counting
economy, that had saved her talented brother from her early hardships
and sent him through college. She had made him what he was; and
beneath her stern exterior she loved him with that intense devotion a
lonely, ingrowing woman feels for the object on which she has spent
her life's thought and effort.

Whenever Katherine entered the sick chamber--they had moved Elsie's
bed into the sitting-room because of its greater convenience and
better air--her heart would stand still as she saw how white and
wasted was her friend. At such a time she would recall with a choking
keenness all of Elsie's virtues, each virtue increased and
purified--her simplicity, her purity, her loyalty.

Several times Elsie came back from the brink of the Great Abyss, over
which she so faintly hovered, and smiled at Katherine and spoke a few
words--but only a few, for Doctor West allowed no more. Each time she
asked, with fluttering trepidation, if any word had come from her
husband; and each time at Katherine's chok