CONTENTS

Chapter Page
I.Westville Prepares to Celebrate[3]
II.The Bubble Reputation[15]
III.Katherine Comes Home[30]
IV.Doctor West’s Lawyer[49]
V.Katherine Prepares for Battle[63]
VI.The Lady Lawyer[80]
VII.The Mask Falls[98]
VIII.The Editor of the Express[116]
IX.The Price of a Man[131]
X.Sunset at The Sycamores[146]
XI.The Trial[158]
XII.Opportunity Knocks at Bruce’s Door[172]
XIII.The Deserter[191]
XIV.The Night Watch[212]
XV.Politics Make Strange Bedfellows[226]
XVI.Through The Storm[240]
XVII.The Cup of Bliss[250]
XVIII.The Candidate and the Tiger[264]
XIX.When Greek Meets Greek[276]
XX.A Spectre Comes to Town[295]
XXI.Bruce to the Front[311]
XXII.The Last Stand[328]
XXIII.At Elsie’s Bedside[346]
XXIV.Billy Harper Writes a Story[368]
XXV.Katherine Faces the Enemy[388]
XXVI.An Idol’s Fall[403]
XXVII.The End of The Beginning[418]

COUNSEL FOR THE DEFENSE

CHAPTER I

WESTVILLE PREPARES TO CELEBRATE

The room was thick with dust and draped with ancient cobwebs. In one corner dismally reposed a literary junk heap—old magazines, broken-backed works of reference, novels once unanimously read but now unanimously forgotten. The desk was a helter-skelter of papers. One of the two chairs had its burst cane seat mended by an atlas of the world; and wherever any of the floor peered dimly through the general débris it showed a complexion of dark and ineradicable greasiness. Altogether, it was a room hopelessly unfit for human habitation; which is perhaps but an indirect manner of stating that it was the office of the editor of a successful newspaper.

Before a typewriter at a small table sat a bare-armed, solitary man. He was twenty-eight or thirty, abundantly endowed with bone and muscle, and with a face——But not to soil this early page with abusive terms, it will be sufficient to remark that whatever the Divine Sculptor had carved his countenance to portray, plainly there had been no thought of re-beautifying the earth with an Apollo. He was constructed not for grace, but powerful, tireless action; and there was something absurdly disproportionate between the small machine and the broad and hairy hands which so heavily belaboured its ladylike keys.