occupied by the New York Store's
"glittering array of vast and profuse fashion." Above this alluring
pageant were two floors of offices; and up the narrow stairway leading
thereunto Katherine mounted. She entered a door marked "Hosea
Hollingsworth. Attorney-at-Law. Mortgages. Loans. Farms." In the
room were a table, three chairs, a case of law books, a desk, on
the top of the desk a "plug" hat, so venerable that it looked a very
great-grandsire of hats, and two cuspidors marked with chromatic
evidence that they were not present for ornament alone.

From the desk there rose a man, perhaps seventy, lean, tall,
smooth-shaven, slightly stooped, dressed in a rusty and wrinkled
"Prince Albert" coat, and with a countenance that looked a rank
plagiarism of the mask of Voltaire. In one corner of his thin mouth,
half chewed away, was an unlighted cigar.

"I believe this is Mr. Hollingsworth?" said Katherine. The question
was purely formal, for his lank figure was one of her earliest
memories.

"Yes. Come right in," he returned in a high, nasal voice.

She drew a chair away from the environs of the cuspidors and sat down.
He resumed his place at his desk and peered at her through his
spectacles, and a dry, almost imperceptible smile played among the
fine wrinkles of his leathery face.

"And I believe this is Katherine West--our lady lawyer," he remarked.
"I read in the _Express_ how you----"

Bruce was on her nerves. She could not restrain a sudden flare of
temper. "The editor of that paper is a cad!"

"Well, he ain't exactly what you might call a hand-raised gentleman,"
the old lawyer admitted. "At least, I never heard of his exerting
himself so hard to be polite that he strained any tendons."

"You know him, then?"

"A little. He's my nephew."

"Oh! I remember."

"And we live together," the old man loquaciously drawled on, eying her
closely with a smile that might have been either good-natured or
satirical. "Batch it--with a nigger who saves us work by stealing
things we'd otherwise have to take care of. We scrap most of the time.
I make fun of him, and he gets sore. The trouble with the editor of
the _Express_ is, he had a doting ma. He should have had an almighty
lot of thrashing when a boy, and instead he never tasted beech limb
once. He's suffering from the spared rod."

Katherine had a shrinking from this old man; an aversion which in her
mature years she had had no occasion to examine, but which she had
i