at she was ready to
hear any explanation tending to mitigate his crime--not in those words
precisely, but in a tone perfectly indicative of her meaning.
Furthermore, that the matter on which she had wished to speak to him was
a business matter, and that she would expect him to keep the broken
appointment later. None of which was ever transmitted. Fate, playing the
role of Miching Mallecho, prevented once again. Hal was out.

In the course of time, Esme's quarantine (a little accelerated, though
not at any risk of public safety) was lifted and she returned to the
world. The battle of hygiene _vs_. infection was now at its height. Esme
threw herself into the work, heart and soul. For weeks she did not set
eyes on Hal Surtaine, except as they might pass on the street. Twice she
narrowly missed him at the hospital where she found time to make an
occasional visit to Ellis. A quick and lively friendship had sprung up
between the spoiled beauty and the old soldier of the print-columns, and
from him, as soon as he was convalescent, she learned something of the
deeper meanings of the "Clarion" fight and of the higher standards which
had cost its owner so dear.

"I suppose," he said, "the hardest thing he ever had to do in his life
was to print your picture."

"Did he _have_ to print it?"

"Didn't he? It was news."

"And that's your god, isn't it, Mr. Mac?" said his visitor, smiling.

"It's only a small name for Truth. Good men have died for that."

"Or killed others for their ideal of it."

"Miss Esme," said the invalid, "Hal Surtaine has had to face two tests.
He had to show up his own father in his paper."

"Yes. I read it. But I've only begun to understand it since our talks."

"And he had to print that about you. Wayne told me he almost killed the
story himself to save Hal. 'I couldn't bear to look at the boy's face
when he told me to run it,' Wayne said. And he's no sentimentalist.
Newspapermen generally ain't."

"_Aren't_ you?" said Esme, with a catch in her breath. "I should think
you were, pretty much, at the 'Clarion' office."

From that day she knew that she must talk it out with Hal. Yet at every
thought of that encounter, her maidenhood shrank, affrighted, with a
sweet and tremulous fear. Inevitable as was the end, it might have been
long postponed had it not been for a word that Ellis let drop the day
when he left the hospital. Mrs. Festus Willard, out of friendship for
Hal, had insisted that the conva