oat. I board just over the way, you know, with Mrs. Quinlan. My name
is Morrow."

The girl gave a little cry of relieved anxiety, and caught the kitten
in her arms.

"Oh, I am so glad! I was afraid it was lost, and it is so tiny and
defenseless to be out all alone in the cold and darkness. Thank you so
much, Mr. Morrow. I suppose it was waiting for me, as it usually does,
and grew restless at my delay, poor little thing! It was kind of you
to comfort it!"

Feeling like an utter brute, Morrow stammered a humble disclaimer of
her undeserved gratitude, and moved toward the steps.

"Oh, but it was really kind of you; most men hate cats, although my
father loves them. I should have been home much earlier but I was
detained by some extra work at the club where I am employed."

"The club?" he repeated stupidly.

"Yes," replied the girl, quietly, cuddling the kitten beneath her
chin. "The Anita Lawton Club for Working Girls."

She caught herself up sharply, even as she spoke, and a look almost of
apprehension crossed her ingenuous face for a moment, and was gone.

"Thank you again for protecting my kitten for me," she said softly.
"Good-night."

Guy Morrow walked down the steps and across to his own lodgings with
his brain awhirl. The investigation, through the medium of a small
black kitten, had indeed taken an amazing turn. Jimmy Brunell's
daughter was a protegee of the daughter of Pennington Lawton!

CHAPTER VI

THE FIRST COUNTER-MOVE

The little paragraph in the newspaper, which, irrelevant as it
would seem, had caught the keenly discerning eye of Henry Blaine,
grew in length and importance from day to day until it reached a
position on the first page, and then spread in huge headlines over
the entire sheet. Instead of relating merely the incidents of a
labor strike in a manufacturing city--and that city a far-distant
one--it became speedily a sociological question of almost national
import. The yellow journals were quick to seize upon it at the
psychological moment of civic unrest, and throw out hints, vague
but vast in their significance, of the mighty interests behind the
mere fact of the strike, the great financial question involved, the
crisis between capital and labor, the trusts and the common people,
the workers and the wasters, in the land of the free.

Henry Blaine, seated in his office, read the scare-heads and smiled
his slow, inscrutable, illuminating smile--the smile which,
without me