Her hat missed the hook and fell to the floor, and she went springing up the stairway. The next instant she flung open her father's door, and walked straight up to Bruce, before whom she paused, bosom heaving, eyes on fire. "What are you doing here?" she demanded. His powerful figure rose, and his square-hewn face looked directly into her own. "Interviewing your father," he returned with his aggressive calm. "He was asking me to confess," explained Doctor West. "Confess?" cried Katherine. "Just so," replied Bruce. "His guilt is undoubted, so he might as well confess." Scorn flamed at him. "I see! You are trying to get a confession out of him, in advance of the trial, as a big feature for your terrible paper!" She moved a pace nearer him. All the suppressed anger, all the hidden anguish, of the last three months burst up volcanically. "Oh! oh!" she cried breathlessly. "I never dreamt till I met you that a man could be so low, so heartless, as to hound an old man as you have hounded my father--and all for the sake of a yellow newspaper sensation. But he's a safe man for you to attack. Yes, he's safe--old, unpopular, helpless!" Bruce's heavy brows lowered. He did not give back a step before her ireful figure. "And because he's old and unpopular I should not attack him, eh?" he demanded. "Because he's down, I should not hit him? That's your woman's reasoning, is it? Well, let me tell you," and his gray eyes flashed, and his voice had a crunching tone--"that I believe when you've got an enemy of society down, don't, because you pity him, let him up to go and do the same thing again. While you've got him down, keep on hitting him till you've got him finished!" "Like the brute that you are!" she cried. "But, like the coward you are, you first very carefully choose your 'enemy of society.' You were careful to choose one who could not hit back!" "I did not choose your father. He thrust himself upon the town's attention. And I consider neither his weakness nor his strength. I consider only the fact that your father has done the city a greater injury than any man who ever lived in Westville." "It's a lie! I tell you it's a lie!" "It's the truth!" he declared harshly, dominantly. "His swindling Westville by giving us a worthless filtering-plant in return for a bribe--why, that is the smallest evil he has done the town. Before that time, Westville was on the verge of making great municipal advances--on the verge of becoming a model and a leader for the small cities of the Middle West. And now all that grand development is ruined--and ruined by that man, your father!" He excitedly jerked a paper from his pocket and held it out to her. "If you want to see what he has brought us to, read that editorial in the _Clarion_!" She fixed him with glittering eyes. "I have read one cowardly editorial to-day in a Westville paper. That is enough." "Read that, I say!" he commanded.