“I might as well sell the ‘Clarion’ now, and be done with it,” he declared bitterly.

“Nonsense!  If you stuck to this foolishness you’d have to sell it or lose it.  You’d be ruined, both in influence and in money.  How would you feel when Mac Ellis, and Wayne, and all the fellows that stuck by you found themselves out of a job because of your pig-headedness?  And what harm are you doing by dropping the story, anyway?  We’ve got this thing beaten, right now.  It isn’t spreading.  It’s dropping off.  What’ll the ‘Clarion’ look like when its great sensation peters out into thin air?  But by that time the harm’ll be done and the whole country will think we’re a plague-stricken city.  Don’t do all that damage and spoil everything just for a false delusion, Boyee.”

But Hal’s mind was brooding on the fatal promise which he had so confidently made his father.  One way out there was.

“Since it’s a question of my word to you,” he said, “I could still publish the truth about Milly Neal.”

“No.  You couldn’t do that, Boyee,” said his father in a tone, half sorrowful, half shamed.

“No.  You’re right.  I couldn’t—­God help me!”

To proclaim his own father a moral criminal in his own paper was the one test which Hal lacked the power to meet.  It was the world-old conflict between loyalty and principle—­in which loyalty so often and so tragically wins the first combat.

After all, Hal forced himself to consider, he was not serving his public ill by this particular sacrifice of principle.  The official mortality figures helped him to persuade himself that the typhus was indeed ebbing.  For himself, as the price of silence, there was easy sailing under the flag of local patriotism, and with every success in prospect.  Yet it was with sunken eyes that he turned to the tempter.

“All right,” he said, with a half groan, “I give in.  We won’t print it.”

Dr. Surtaine heaved a great sigh of relief.  “That’s horse sense!” he cried jovially.  “Now, you go ahead on those lines and you’ll make the ‘Clarion’ the best-paying proposition in Worthington.  I’ll drop a few hints where they’ll do the most good, and you’ll see the advertisers breaking their necks to come in.  Journalism is no different from any other business, Boy-ee.  Live and let live.  Bear and forbear.  There’s the rule for you.  The trouble with you, Boy-ee, has been that you’ve been trying to run a business on pink-tea principles.”

“The trouble with me,” said his son bitterly, “is that I’ve been trying to reform a city when I ought to have been reforming myself.”

“Oh, you’re all right, Boy-ee,” his affectionate and admiring father reassured him.  “You’re just finding yourself.  As for this reform—­” And he was launched upon the second measure of the Paean of Policy when Hal cut him short by ringing a bell and ordering the boy to send McGuire Ellis to him.  Ellis came up from the city room.