for
you to meet Harriet. I'm sure you'd like her."

Nan smiled.

"I could see she likes you. I don't think she took a fancy to me,
however."

"Nonsense, Nan." he said, with annoyance. "She couldn't have seen you.
I didn't know she was here until she kissed her father."

"Perhaps my eyes are keener than yours."

The captain of the district brushed rudely past and sprang into his
automobile. He waved his hand to his chauffeur. His gesture was
mistaken by a pair of keen restless eyes for a command to his reserves
to disperse the crowd.

A pale, shabby young fellow leaped past the line of police into the
open space and rushed straight for the reserves. His long thin arm was
lifted high in the air clutching a black thing with a lighted fuse
sparkling from its crest.

A murmur rippled the crowd, the police stood still and stared, and the
next moment the bomb exploded in the boy's hand and his body lay on the
stones a mangled heap of torn flesh and blood-soaked rags.

The police charged the crowd and clubbed them without mercy. The people
fled in confusion in every direction, and in five minutes the Square
was cleared.

Stuart had hurried Nan to her car, and rushed back to the scene of the
tragedy. He readily passed the lines of the police, who recognized him
as the district attorney.

The doctor reached the spot and Harriet was holding the dying boy's
head in her lap.

Stuart bent over her curiously and slowly asked:

"You were not afraid to rush up here with your father and take that
poor mangled thing in your arms?"

"Of course not," she replied simply. "Papa says he's dying--nothing can
be done for him. They've sent for an ambulance."

The doctor stood staring at the dying boy and a tear had slowly
gathered in his kindly eye.

He pressed Stuart's arm and spoke in low tones:

"I've made some big mistakes in my life, my boy. I'm just beginning to
see them. I've read a new message in the flutter of this poor fellow's
pulse. I'll not be slow to heed it."

But Stuart stood watching with growing wonder Harriet's deft little
hand brush the damp hair back from the poor disfigured face.

CHAPTER XV

CONFESSION

The face of the dying boy haunted the doctor's imagination. With his
eyes closed or open, at noon or alone at night the pity and the horror
of his lonely death gripped him. A boy of twenty, weak, hungry, ragged,
alone, had dared to lift his thin arm above his head and charge the
entrenche