He had risen, and now was standing there at his side of the table, shaking with violent emotion, his glasses awry, face wrinkled and drawn, hands twitching.  His daughter, making no answer to his taunts, sat with the paper spread before her on the table.  A wine glass, overset, had spilled a red stain—­for all the world like the workers’ blood, spilled in war and industry for the greater wealth and glory of the masters—­out across the costly damask, but neither she nor Flint paid any heed.

For he was staring only at her; and she, now having mastered herself a little, though her full breast still rose and fell too quickly, was struggling to read the slanderous lies and foul libels of the blue-penciled article.

Silently she read, paling a little but otherwise giving no sign to show her father how the tide of her thought was setting.  Twice over she read the article; then, pushing the paper back, looked at old Flint with eyes that seemed to question his very soul—­eyes that saw the living truth, below.

“It is a lie!” said she, at last, in a grave, quiet voice.

“What?” blurted the old man.  “A—­a lie?”

She nodded.

“Yes,” said she.  “A lie.”

Furious, he ripped open the paper, and once more shoved it at her.

“Fool!” cried he.  “Read that!” And his shaking, big-knuckled finger tapped the editorial on “Socialism Unveiled.”

“No,” she answered, “I need read no more.  I know; I understand!”

“You—­you know what?” choked Flint.  “This is an editorial, I tell you!  It represents the best thought and the most careful opinion of the paper.  And it condemns this man, absolutely, as a criminal and a menace to society.  It denounces him and his whole gang of Socialists or Anarchists or White-slavers—­they’re all the same thing—­as a plague to the world.  That’s the editor’s opinion; and remember, he’s on the ground, there.  He has all the facts.  You—­you are at a distance, and have none!  Yet you set up your futile, childish opinion—­”

“No more, father!  No more!” cried Catherine, also standing up.  She faced him calmly, coldly, magnificently.  “You can’t talk to me this way, any more.  Cannot, and must not!  As I see this thing—­and my woman’s intuition tells me more in a minute than you can explain away in an hour—­this fabrication here has all, or nearly all, been invented and carried out by you.  For what reason?  This—­to discredit this man!  To make me hate and loathe him!  To force me back to Waldron.  To—­”

“Stop!” shouted the old man, in a well-assumed passion.  “No daughter of mine shall talk to me this way!  Silence!  It is monstrous and unthinkable.  It—­it is horrible beyond belief!  Silence, I tell you—­and—­”

“No, father, not silence,” she replied, with perfect poise.  “Not silence now, but speech.  Either this thing is true or it is false.  In either case, I must know the facts.  The papers?  No truth in those!  The finding of the courts? today, they are a by-word and a mockery!  All I can trust is the evidence of my own senses; what I hear, and feel, and see.  So then—­”