Again today, at a certain street, on the ragged boundaries of the city, Lawrence Holcombe stopped the trolley car and got off. Holcombe was a handsome, prosperous business man of forty; a man of high social standing and connections. His comfortable suburban residence was some five miles farther out on the car line from the street where so often of late he had dropped off the outgoing car. The conductor winked at a regular passenger, and nodded his head archly in the direction of Holcombe's hurrying figure. "Getting to be a regular thing," commented the conductor. Holcombe picked his way gingerly down a roughly graded side street infested with ragged urchins and impeded by abandoned tinware. He stopped at a small cottage fenced in with a patch of stony ground with a few stunted shade-trees growing about it. A stout, middle-aged woman was washing clothes in a tub at one side of the door. She looked around, and smiled a smile of fat recognition. "Good avening, Mr. Holcombe, is it yerself ag'in? Ye'll find Katie inside, sir." "Did you speak to her for me?" asked Holcombe, in a low voice; "did you try to help me gain her consent as you promised to do?" "Sure, and I did that. But, sir, ye know gyurls will be gyurls. The more ye coax 'em the wilfuller they gets. 'Tis yer own pleadin' that'll get her if anything will. An' I hopes ye may, for I tells her she'll never get a betther offer than yours, sir. 'Tis a good girl she is, and a tidy hand for anything from the kitchen to the parlour, and she's never a fault except, maybe, a bit too much likin' for dances and ruffles and ribbons, but that's natural to her age and good looks if I do say it meself, bein' her mither, Mr. Holcombe. Ye can spake ag'in to Katie, sir, and maybe this time ye'll have luck unless Danny Conlan, the wild gossoon, has been at it ag'in overpersuadin' her ag'inst ye." Holcombe turned slightly pale, and his lips closed tightly for a moment. "I've heard of this fellow Conlan before. Why does he interfere? Why does he stand in the way? Is there anything between him and Katie? Does Katie care for him?" Mrs. Flynn gave a sigh, like a puff of a locomotive, and a flap upon the washboard with a sodden garment that sent Holcombe, well splashed, six feet away. "Ask me no questions about what's in a gyurl's heart and I'll tell ye no lies. Her own mither can't tell any more than yerself, Mr. Holcombe." Holcombe stepped inside the cottage. Katie Flynn, with rolled-up sleeves, was ironing a dress of flounced muslin. Criticism of Holcombe's deviation from his own sphere to this star of lower orbit must have waned at the sight of the girl. Her beauty was of the most solvent and convincing sort. Dusky Irish eyes, one great braid of jetty, shining hair, a crimson mouth, dimpling and shaping itself to every mood of its owner, a figure strong and graceful, seemingly full of imperishable life and action--Katie Flynn was one to be sought after and striven for.