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 make a darned good story.”

V

When he finished medical college Dick Livingstone had found, like other men, that the two paths of ambition and duty were parallel and did not meet.  Along one lay his desire to focus all his energy in one direction, to follow disease into the laboratory instead of the sick room, and there to fight its unsung battles.  And win.  He felt that he would win.

Along the other lay David.

It was not until he had completed his course and had come home that he had realized that David was growing old.  Even then he might have felt that, by the time David was compelled to relinquish his hold on his practice, he himself would be sufficiently established in his specialty to take over the support of the household.  But here there was interposed a new element, one he had not counted on.  David was fiercely jealous of his practice; the thought that it might pass into new and alien hands was bitter to him.  To hand it down to his adopted son was one thing; to pass it over to “some young whipper-snapper” was another.