this, all my natural energy and innate radicalism have flamed into activity with this new thought.  So, you see, the past is even more effectively buried than ever.  How could anything ever be possible, now, between you and me?

Cease to think of me, Wally.  I am gone out of your life, for all time, as out of that whole circle of false, insincere, wicked and parasitic existence that we call “society.”  That other world, where you still are, shall see me no more.  I have found a better and a nobler kind of life; and to this, and to all it implies, I mean to be forever faithful.  I beg you, never try to find me or to answer this.

     Good-bye, then, forever.

     Catherine.

After having read this over and sealed it, she wrote still another: 

     Dear Father: 

It is hard to write these words to you.  I owe you a debt of gratitude and love, in many ways; yet, after all, your will and mine conflict.  You have tried to force me to a union abhorrent and impossible to me.  My only course is this—­independence to think, and act, and live as I, no longer a child but a grown woman, now see fit.

I shall never return to you, father.  Life means one thing to you, another to me.  You cannot change; I would not, now, for all the world.  I must go my way, thinking my own thoughts, doing my own work, living up to my own ideals, whatever these may be.  Your money cannot lure me back to you, back to that old, false, sheltered, horrible life of ease and idleness and veiled robbery!  The skill you have given me as a musician will open out a way for me to earn my own living and be free.  For this I thank you, and for much else, even as I say good-bye to you for all time.

I have written Wally.  He will tell you more about me, and about the change in my views and ambitions, which has taken place.  Do not think harshly of me, father, and I will try to forgive you for the burden I now know you have laid upon the aching shoulders of this sad, old world.

And now, good-bye.  Though you have lost a daughter, you may still rejoice to know that that daughter has found peace and joy and vast outlets for the energies of her whole heart and soul and being, in working for Socialism, the noblest ideal ever conceived by the mind of man.

     Farewell, father; and think sometimes, not too unkindly, of

     Your

     Kate.

One week after these letters were mailed, “Tiger” Waldron, fanning the fires of the old man’s terrible rage, had decided Flint to disinherit Catherine and to name him, Waldron, as his executor.  Gabriel’s fervent wish that she might be penniless, was granted.

On the very day this business was put through, practically delivering the Flint interests into Waldron’s hands in the case of the old man’s death, a verdict was reached in Gabriel’s case, at Rochester.