e this prospective success as a thing of
lesser magnitude. The agreement would prove the alliance between Blake
and Peck, and would make clear that a conspiracy existed. It was good,
but it was not enough. It fell short by more than half. It would not
clear her father, though his innocence might be inferred, and it would
not prove Blake's responsibility for the epidemic.

As she lay there staring wide-eyed into the gloom of the night,
listening to the town clock count off the hours of her last day, she
realized that what she needed most of all, far more than Manning's
document even should he get it, was the testimony which she believed
was sealed behind the lips of Doctor Sherman, whose present
whereabouts God only knew.

CHAPTER XXIII

AT ELSIE'S BEDSIDE

The day before election, a day of hope deferred, had dragged slowly by
and night had at length settled upon the city. Doctor West had the
minute before come in from a long, dinnerless day of hastening from
case to case, and now he, Katherine, and her aunt were sitting about
the supper table. To Katherine's eye her father looked very weary and
white and frail. The day-and-night struggle at scores of bedsides was
sorely wearing him down.

As for Katherine, she was hardly less worn. She scarcely touched the
food before her. The fears that always assail one at a crisis, now
swarmed in upon her. With the election but a few hours distant, with
no word as yet from Mr. Manning, she saw all her high plans coming to
naught and saw herself overwhelmed with utter defeat. From without
there dimly sounded the beginning of the ferment of the campaign's
final evening; it brought to her more keenly that to-morrow the city
was going to give itself over unanimously to be despoiled. Across the
table, her father, pale and worried, was a reminder that, when his
fight of the plague was completed, he must return to jail. Her mind
flashed now and then to Bruce; she saw him in prison; she saw not only
his certain defeat on the morrow, but she saw him crushed and ruined
for life as far as a career in Westville was concerned; and though she
bravely tried to master her feeling, the throbbing anguish with which
she looked upon his fate was affirmation of how poignant and
deep-rooted was her love.

And yet, despite these flooding fears, she clung with a dizzy
desperation to hope, and to the determination to fight on to the last
second of the last minute.

While swinging thus betwe