Bruce waved his hand peremptorily. “They’re all the same! But what’s she doing in New York? Practising law?”
“No. She’s working for an organization something like Doctor Sherman’s—The Municipal League, I think she called it.”
“Huh!” grunted Bruce. “Well, whatever she’s like, it’s a pretty mess she’s coming back into!”
With that the editor pulled his hat tightly down upon his forehead and strode out of the Court House and past the speakers’ stand, across whose front twin flags were being leisurely festooned. Back in his own office he picked up the story he had finished an hour before. With a sneer he tore it across and trampled it under foot. Then, jerking a chair forward to his typewriter, his brow dark, his jaw set, he began to thump fiercely upon the keys.
CHAPTER III
KATHERINE COMES HOME
Next morning when the Limited slowed down beside the old frame station—a new one of brick was rising across the tracks—a young woman descended from a Pullman at the front of the train. She was lithe and graceful, rather tall and slender, and was dressed with effective simplicity in a blue tailored suit and a tan straw hat with a single blue quill. Her face was flushed, and there glowed an expectant brightness in her brown eyes, as though happiness and affection were upon the point of bubbling over.
Standing beside her suit-case, she eagerly scanned the figures about the station. Three or four swagger young drummers had scrambled off the smoker, and these ambassadors of fashion as many hotel bus drivers were inviting with importunate hospitality to honour their respective board and bed. There was the shirt-sleeved figure of Jim Ludlow, ticket agent and tenor of the Presbyterian choir. And leaning cross-legged beneath the station eaves, giving the effect of supporting the low roof, were half a dozen slowly masticating, soberly contemplative gentlemen—loose-jointed caryatides, whose lank sculpture forms the sole and invariable ornamentation of the façades of all Western stations. But nowhere did the young woman’s expectant eyes alight upon the person whom they sought.