The weeks dragged heavily on—hot and dusty after the first of July, and so dry that out in the country the caked earth was a fine network of zigzagging fissures, and the farmers, gazing despondently upon their shrivelling corn, watched with vain hope for a rescuing cloud to darken the clear, hard, brilliant heavens. At length the summer burned to its close; the opening day of the September term of court was close at hand. But still the case stood just as on the day Katherine had stepped so joyously from the Limited. The evidence of Sherman was unshaken. The charges of Bruce had no answer.
One afternoon—her father’s case was set for two days later—as Katherine left her office, desperate, not knowing which way to turn, her nerves worn fine and thin by the long strain, she saw her father’s name on the front page of the Express. She bought a copy. In the centre of the first page, in a “box” and set in heavy-faced type, was an editorial in Bruce’s most rousing style, trying her father in advance, declaring him flagrantly guilty, and demanding for him the law’s extremest penalty.
That editorial unloosed her long-collected wrath—wrath that had many a reason. In Bruce’s person Katherine had from the first seen the summing up, the leader, of the bitterness against her father. All summer he had continued his sharp attacks, and the virulence of these had helped keep the town wrought up against Doctor West. Moreover, Katherine despised Bruce as a powerful, ruthless, demagogic hypocrite. And to her hostility against him in her father’s behalf and to her contempt for his quack radicalism, was added the bitter implacability of the woman who feels herself scorned. The town’s attitude toward her she resented. But Bruce she hated, and him she prayed with all her soul that she might humble.
She crushed the Express, flung it from her into the gutter, and walked home all a-tremble. Her aunt met her in the hall as she was laying off her hat. A spot burned faintly in either withered cheek of the old woman.
“Who does thee think is here?” she asked.
“Who?” Katherine repeated mechanically, her wrath too high for interest in anything else.
“Mr. Bruce. Upstairs with thy father.”
“What!” cried Katherine.
Her hat missed the hook and fell to the floor, and she went springing up the stairway. The next instant she flung open her father’s door, and walked straight up to Bruce, before whom she paused, bosom heaving, eyes on fire.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded.