ust for a false delusion, Boyee."

But Hal's mind was brooding on the fatal promise which he had so
confidently made his father. One way out there was.

"Since it's a question of my word to you," he said, "I could still
publish the truth about Milly Neal."

"No. You couldn't do that, Boyee," said his father in a tone, half
sorrowful, half shamed.

"No. You're right. I couldn't--God help me!"

To proclaim his own father a moral criminal in his own paper was the
one test which Hal lacked the power to meet. It was the world-old
conflict between loyalty and principle--in which loyalty so often and so
tragically wins the first combat.

After all, Hal forced himself to consider, he was not serving his public
ill by this particular sacrifice of principle. The official mortality
figures helped him to persuade himself that the typhus was indeed
ebbing. For himself, as the price of silence, there was easy sailing
under the flag of local patriotism, and with every success in prospect.
Yet it was with sunken eyes that he turned to the tempter.

"All right," he said, with a half groan, "I give in. We won't print it."

Dr. Surtaine heaved a great sigh of relief. "That's horse sense!" he
cried jovially. "Now, you go ahead on those lines and you'll make the
'Clarion' the best-paying proposition in Worthington. I'll drop a few
hints where they'll do the most good, and you'll see the advertisers
breaking their necks to come in. Journalism is no different from any
other business, Boy-ee. Live and let live. Bear and forbear. There's the
rule for you. The trouble with you, Boy-ee, has been that you've been
trying to run a business on pink-tea principles."

"The trouble with me," said his son bitterly, "is that I've been trying
to reform a city when I ought to have been reforming myself."

"Oh, you're all right, Boy-ee," his affectionate and admiring father
reassured him. "You're just finding yourself. As for this reform--" And
he was launched upon the second measure of the Paean of Policy when Hal
cut him short by ringing a bell and ordering the boy to send McGuire
Ellis to him. Ellis came up from the city room.

"Kill the epidemic story, Mr. Ellis," he ordered.

Red passion surged up into Ellis's face.

"Kill--" he began, in a strangled voice.

"Kill it. You understand?" The associate editor's color receded. He
looked with slow contempt from father to son.

"Oh, yes, I understand," he said. "Any other orders to-day?"

Ha