“We won’t have one of these cloud-bursts again, I promise you. But when you have been under a strain for months, and things are stretched tighter and tighter, and at last something makes things snap, why you just can’t help—well,” she ended, “a man would have done something else, I suppose, but it might have been just as bad.”
“Worse!” avowed her father.
“Anyhow, it’s all over. I’ll just repair some of the worst ravages of the storm, and then we’ll talk about our programme for the trial.”
As she was arranging her hair before her father’s mirror, she saw, in the glass, the old man stoop and take something from the waste-basket. Turning his back to her, he cautiously examined the object.
She left the mirror and came up behind him.
“What are you looking at, dear?”
He started, and glanced up.
“Oh—er—that editorial Mr. Bruce referred to.” He rubbed his head dazedly. “If that should happen, with me even indirectly the cause of it—why, Katherine, it really would be pretty bad!” He held out the Clarion. “Perhaps, after all, you had better read it.”
She took the paper. The Clarion had from the first opposed the city’s owning the water-works, and the editorial declared that the present situation gave the paper, and all those who had held a similar opinion, their long-awaited triumph and vindication. “This failure is only what invariably happens whenever a city tries municipal ownership,” declared the editorial. “The situation has grown so unbearably acute that the city’s only hope of good water lies in the sale of the system to some private concern, which will give us that superior service which is always afforded by private capital. Westville is upon the eve of a city election, and we most emphatically urge upon both parties that they make the chief plank of their platforms the immediate sale of our utterly discredited water-works to some private company.”
The editorial did not stir Katherine as it had appeared to stir Bruce, nor even in the milder degree it had stirred Doctor West. She was interested in the water-works only in so far as it concerned her father, and the Clarion’s proposal had no apparent bearing on his guilt or innocence.