“Well, that’s over,” said Hal, as his father departed, gently smoothing down his silk hat.  “And I hope that ends it.”

“Do you?” McGuire Ellis raised a tuneful baritone in song:—­

’You may think you’ve got ’em going,’ said the bar-keep to the bum. 
’But cheer up
And beer up. 
The worst is yet to come!’

“Unless my estimate of E.M.  Pierce is wrong,” he continued, “you’ll begin to hear from the other newspapers soon.”

So it proved.  Advertising managers called up and talked interminably over the telephone.  Editors-in-chief wrote polite notes.  One fellow proprietor called.  By all the canons of editorial courtesy they exhorted Mr. Surtaine to hold his hand from the contemplated sacrilege against their friend and patron, Elias M. Pierce.  Equally polite, Mr. Surtaine replied that the “Clarion” would print the news.  How much of the news would he print?  All the news, now and forever, one and inseparable, or words to that effect.  Painfully and protestingly the noble fellowship of the free and untrammeled press pointed out that if the “Clarion” insisted on informing the public, they too, in self-defense, must supply something in the way of information to cover themselves, loth though they were so to do.  But the burden of sin and vengeance would rest upon the paper which forced them into such a course.  Still patient, Hal found refuge in truism:  to wit, that what his fellow editors chose to do was wholly and specifically their business.  From the corollary, he courteously refrained.

Meantime, the object of Editor Surtaine’s scathing had not been idle.  To the indignant journalist, Miss Kathleen Pierce had appeared a brutal and hardened scion of wealth and injustice.  This was hardly a just view.  Careless she was, and unmindful of standards; but not cruel.  In this instance, panic, not callousness, had been the mainspring of her apparent cruelty.  She was badly scared; and when her angry father told her what she might expect at the hands of a “yellow newspaper,” she became still more badly scared.  In this frame of mind she fled for refuge to Miss Esme Elliot.

“I didn’t mean to run over her,” she wailed.  “You know I didn’t, Esme.  She ran out just like a m-m-mouse, and I felt the car hit her, and then she was all crumpled up in the gutter.  Oh, I was so frightened!  I wanted to go back, but I was afraid, and Phil began to cry and say we’d killed her, and I lost my head and put on speed.  I didn’t mean to, Esme!”

“Of course you didn’t, dear.  Who says you did?”

“The newspaper is going to say so.  That awful reporter!  He caught me at the station and asked me a lot of questions.  I just shook my head and wouldn’t say a word,” lied the frightened girl.  “But they’re going to print an awful interview with me, father says.  He’s furious at me.”

“In what paper, Kathie?”

“The ‘Clarion.’  Father says the other papers won’t publish anything about it, but he can’t stop the ‘Clarion.’”