al with a dawning dread.

"Boyee, I hate to do this, but I've got to, to save the city. You gave
me your word that the day you had to suppress news for your own sake,
you'd quit this Don Quixotic business and treat others as decently and
considerately as you treated yourself."

"Go on," said Hal, in a half whisper.

"Well--Milly Neal." Dr. Surtaine wet his lips nervously. "You saved
yourself there by keeping the story out of the papers. Of course you
were right. You were dead right. You'd have been a fool to do anything
else. But there you are. And there's your promise."

A nausea of the soul sickened Hal. That his father, whom he had so loved
and honored, should make of the loyalty which had, at the cost of
principle, protected the name of Surtaine against open disgrace, a tool
wherewith to tear down his professional standards--it was like some
incredible and malign jocosity of a devilish logic. Of what was going on
in the quack's mind he had no inkling. He could not know that his father
saw in the suppression of the suicide news, only a natural and
successful effort on the part of Hal to conceal his own guilt in Milly's
death. No more could Dr. Surtaine comprehend that it was the dreadful
responsibility of the Surtaine quackery for which Hal had unhesitantly
sacrificed the declared principle of the "Clarion." So they gazed darkly
at each other across the chasm, each seeing his opponent in the blackest
colors.

"You hold me to that?" demanded Hal, half choked.

"I have to, Boy-ee."

To Dr. Surtaine the issue which he had raised was but the distasteful
means to a necessary end. To Hal it meant the final capitulation to the
forces against which he had been fighting since his first enlightenment.

"I might as well sell the 'Clarion' now, and be done with it," he
declared bitterly.

"Nonsense! If you stuck to this foolishness you'd have to sell it or
lose it. You'd be ruined, both in influence and in money. How would you
feel when Mac Ellis, and Wayne, and all the fellows that stuck by you
found themselves out of a job because of your pig-headedness? And what
harm are you doing by dropping the story, anyway? We've got this thing
beaten, right now. It isn't spreading. It's dropping off. What'll the
'Clarion' look like when its great sensation peters out into thin air?
But by that time the harm'll be done and the whole country will think
we're a plague-stricken city. Don't do all that damage and spoil
everything j