ked up?"

"They let me go his bail."

Again Katherine caught her aunt's arm.

"Come--tell me all about it!"

"Please don't make me. I--I can't."

"But I must know!"

"It's in the newspapers--they're on the centre-table."

Katherine turned to the table and seized a paper. At sight of the
sheet she had picked up, the old woman hurried across to her in
dismay.

"Don't read that _Express_!" she cried, and she sought to draw the
paper from Katherine's hands. "Read the _Clarion_. It's ever so much
kinder."

But Katherine had already seen the headline that ran across the top of
the _Express_. It staggered her. She gasped at the blow, but she held
on to the paper.

"I'll read the worst they have to say," she said.

Her aunt dropped into a chair and covered her eyes to avoid sight of
the girl's suffering. The story, in its elements, was a commonplace to
Katherine; in her work with the Municipal League she had every few
days met with just such a tale as this. But that which is a
commonplace when strangers are involved, becomes a tragedy when loved
ones are its actors. So, as she read the old, old story, Katherine
trembled as with mortal pain.

But sickening as was the story in itself, it was made even more
agonizing to her by the manner of the _Express's_ telling. Bruce's
typewriter had never been more impassioned. The story was in
heavy-faced type, the lines two columns wide; and in a "box" in the
very centre of the first page was an editorial denouncing Doctor West
and demanding for him such severe punishment as would make future
traitors forever fear to sell their city. Article and editorial were
rousing and vivid, brilliant and bitter--as mercilessly stinging as a
salted whip-lash cutting into bare flesh.

Katherine writhed with the pain of it. "Oh!" she cried. "It's brutal!
Brutal! Who could have had the heart to write like that about father?"

"The editor, Arnold Bruce," answered her aunt.

"Oh, he's a brute! If I could tell him to his face----" Her whole
slender being flamed with anger and hatred, and she crushed the paper
in a fierce hand and flung it to the floor.

Then, slowly, her face faded to an ashen gray. She steadied herself on
the back of a chair and stared in desperate, fearful supplication at
the bowed figure of the older woman.

"Auntie?" she breathed.

"Yes?"

"Auntie"--eyes and voice were pleading--"auntie, the--the things--this
paper says--they never happened, did they?"

The ol