And as for his paper, when Katherine looked at it it made her sick at heart. Within a day it lost a third in size. Advertisers no longer dared, perhaps no longer cared, to give it patronage. Its news and editorial character collapsed. This last she could hardly understand, for Billy Harper was in charge, and Bruce had often praised him to her as a marvel of a newspaper man. But one evening, when she was coming home late from Elsie Sherman’s and hurrying through the crowd of Main Street, Billy Harper lurched against her. The next day, with a little adroit inquiry, she learned that Harper, freed from Bruce’s restraining influence, and depressed by the general situation, was drinking constantly. It required no prophetic vision for Katherine to see that, if things continued as they now were going, on the day Bruce came out of jail he would find the Express, which he had lifted to power and a promise of prosperity, had sunk into a disrepute and a decay from which even so great an energy as his could not restore it.
Since there was so little she could do elsewhere, Katherine was at the Shermans’ several times a day, trying in unobtrusive ways to aid the nurse and Doctor Sherman’s sister. Miss Sherman was a spare, silent woman of close upon forty, with rather sharp, determined features. Despite her unloveliness, Katherine respected her deeply, for in other days Elsie had told her sister-in-law’s story. Miss Sherman and her brother were orphans. To her had been given certain plain virtues, to him all the graces of mind and body. She was a country school-teacher, and it had been her hard work, her determination, her penny-counting economy, that had saved her talented brother from her early hardships and sent him through college. She had made him what he was; and beneath her stern exterior she loved him with that intense devotion a lonely, ingrowing woman feels for the object on which she has spent her life’s thought and effort.
Whenever Katherine entered the sick chamber—they had moved Elsie’s bed into the sitting-room because of its greater convenience and better air—her heart would stand still as she saw how white and wasted was her friend. At such a time she would recall with a choking keenness all of Elsie’s virtues, each virtue increased and purified—her simplicity, her purity, her loyalty.
Several times Elsie came back from the brink of the Great Abyss, over which she so faintly hovered, and smiled at Katherine and spoke a few words—but only a few, for Doctor West allowed no more. Each time she asked, with fluttering trepidation, if any word had come from her husband; and each time at Katherine’s choking negative she would try to smile bravely and hide her disappointment.
On one of the last days of this period—it was the Sunday before election—Doctor West had said that either the end or a turn for the better must be close at hand. Katherine had been sitting long watching Elsie’s pale face and faintly rising bosom, when Elsie slowly opened her eyes. Elsie pressed her friend’s hand with a barely perceptible pressure and smiled with the faintest shadow of a smile.
“You here again, Katherine?” she breathed.
“Yes, dear.”
“Just the same dear Katherine!”
“Don’t speak, Elsie.”
She was silent a space. Then the wistful look Katherine had seen so often came into the patient’s soft gray eyes, and she knew what Elsie’s words were going to be before they passed her lips.