t he had
been snubbed, and he resented such treatment all the more from a woman
toward whom he had somewhat relaxed his dignity and his principles.

As he sat alone on his porch that night he breathed out along with his
smoke an accompanying fire of profanity; but for all his wrath, he
could not keep the questions from arising. Why had she gone? What was
she going to do? Was she coming back? Had she given up her father's
case, and had she been silent to him that afternoon about her going
for the simple reason that she had been ashamed to acknowledge her
retreat?

He waited impatiently for the return of his uncle, who had been absent
that evening from supper. He thought that Hosie might answer these
questions since he knew the old man to be on friendly terms with
Katherine. But when Old Hosie did shuffle up the gravel walk, he was
almost as much at a loss as his nephew. True, a note from Katherine
had been thrust under his door telling him she wished to talk with him
that afternoon; but he had spent the day looking at farms and had not
found the note till his return from the country half an hour before.

Bruce flung away his cigar in exasperation, and the dry night
air was vibrant with half-whispered but perfervid curses. She was
irritating, erratic, irrational, irresponsible--preposterous, simply
preposterous--damn that kind of women anyhow! They pretended to be a
lot, but there wasn't a damned thing to them!

But he could not subdue his curiosity, though he fervently informed
himself of the thousand and one kinds of an unblessed fool he was for
bothering his head about her. Nor could he banish her image. Her
figure kept rising before him out of the hot, dusty blackness: as she
had appeared before the jury yesterday, slender, spirited,
clever--yes, she had spoken cleverly, he would admit that; as she had
appeared in her parlour that afternoon, a graceful, courteous,
self-possessed home person; as he had seen her in Mr. Huggins's old
surrey, with her exasperating, non-committal, cool little nod. But
why, oh, why, in the name of the flaming rendezvous of lost and
sizzling souls couldn't a woman with her qualities also have just one
grain--only one single little grain!--of the commonest common-sense?

The next morning Bruce sent young Harper to inquire from Doctor West
in the jail, and after that from Katherine's aunt, why Katherine had
gone to New York, whether she had abandoned the case, and whether she
had gone fo