lf, Lucy," he said. "You're not
sleeping either."

"I've had some. Good-night."

He went in and sitting on the side of his bed sipped at his milk. Lucy
was right. It was not in their hands. He had the feeling all at once of
having relinquished a great burden. He crawled into bed and was almost
instantly asleep.

So sometime after midnight found David sleeping, and Lucy on her knees.
It found Elizabeth dreamlessly unconscious in her white bed, and Dick
Livingstone asleep also, but in his clothing, and in a chair by the
window. In the light from a street lamp his face showed lines of fatigue
and nervous stress, lines only revealed when during sleep a man casts
off the mask with which he protects his soul against even friendly eyes.

But midnight found others awake. It found Nina, for instance, in her
draped French bed, consulting her jeweled watch and listening for
Leslie's return from the country club. An angry and rather heart-sick
Nina. And it found the night editor of one of the morning papers
drinking a cup of coffee that a boy had brought in, and running through
a mass of copy on his desk. He picked up several sheets of paper, with
a photograph clamped to them, and ran through them quickly. A man in a
soft hat, sitting on the desk, watched him idly.

"Beverly Carlysle," commented the night editor. "Back with bells on!" He
took up the photograph. "Doesn't look much older, does she? It's a queer
world."

Louis Bassett, star reporter and feature writer of the Times-Republican,
smiled reminiscently.

"She was a wonder," he said. "I interviewed her once, and I was crazy
about her. She had the stage set for me, all right. The papers had been
full of the incident of Jud Clark and the night he lined up fifteen
Johnnies in the lobby, each with a bouquet as big as a tub, all of them
in top hats and Inverness coats, and standing in a row. So she played up
the heavy domestic for me; knitting or sewing, I forget."

"Fell for her, did you?"

"Did I? That was ten years ago, and I'm not sure I'm over it yet."

"Probably that's the reason," said the city editor, drily. "Go and see
her, and get over it. Get her views on the flapper and bobbed hair, for
next Sunday. Smith would be crazy about it."

He finished his coffee.

"You might ask, too, what she thinks has become of Judson Clark," he
added. "I have an idea she knows, if any one does." Bassett stared at
him.

"You're joking, aren't you?"

"Yes. But it would ma