Katherine still retained her girlish admiration of Mr. Blake. Despite his having been so conspicuous at the forefront of public affairs, no scandal had ever soiled his name. His rectitude, so said people whose memories ran back a generation, was due mainly to fine qualities inherited from his mother, for his father had been a good-natured, hearty, popular politician with no discoverable bias toward over-scrupulosity. In fact, twenty years ago there had been a great to-do touching the voting, through a plan of the elder Blake's devising, of a gang of negroes half a dozen times down in a river-front ward. But his party had rushed loyally to his rescue, and had vindicated him by sending him to Congress; and his sudden death on the day after taking his seat had at the time abashed all accusation, and had suffused his memory with a romantic afterglow of sentiment. Blake lived alone with his mother in a house adjoining the Wests', and a few moments after Katherine had left her father she turned into the Blakes' yard. The house stood far back in a spacious lawn, shady with broad maples and aspiring pines, and set here and there with shrubs and flower-beds and a fountain whose misty spray hung a golden aureole upon the sunlight. It was quite worthy of Westville's most distinguished citizen--a big, roomy house of brick, its sterner lines all softened with cool ivy, and with a wide piazza crossing its entire front and embracing its two sides. The hour was that at which Westville arose from its accustomed mid-day dinner--which was the reason Katherine was calling at Blake's home instead of going downtown to his office. She was informed that he was in. Telling the maid she would await him in his library, where she knew he received all clients who called on business at his home, she ascended the well-remembered stairway and entered a large, light room with walls booked to the ceiling. Despite her declaration to her father that that old love episode had been long forgotten by Mr. Blake, at this moment it was not forgotten by her. She could not subdue a fluttering agitation over the circumstance that she was about to appeal for succour to a man she had once refused. She had but a moment to wait. Blake's tall, straight figure entered and strode rapidly across the room, his right hand outstretched. "What--you, Katherine! I'm so glad to see you!" She had risen. "And I to see you, Mr. Blake." For all he had once vowed himself her lover, she had never overcome her girlhood awe of him sufficiently to use the more familiar "Harrison." "I knew you were coming home, but I had not expected to see you so soon. Please sit down again." She resumed her soft leather-covered chair, and he took the swivel chair at his great flat-topped library desk. His manner was most cordial, but lurking beneath it Katherine sensed a certain constraint--due perhaps, to their old relationship--perhaps due to meeting a friend involved in a family disgrace.