He saw Dick stop in front of the house, get out and enter.  And coming to a decision, he followed him and rang the doorbell.  For a long time no one answered.  Then the maid of the afternoon opened the door, her eyes red with crying, and looked at him with hostility.

“Doctor Richard Livingstone?”

“You can’t see him.”

“It’s important.”

“Well, you can’t see him.  Doctor David has just had a stroke.  He’s in the office now, on the floor.”

She closed the door on him, and he turned and went away.  It was all clear to him; Gregory had seen, not Clark, but the older man; had told him and gone away.  And under the shock the older man had collapsed.  That was sad.  It was very sad.  But it was also extremely convincing.

He sat up late that night again, running over the entries in his notebook.  The old story, as he pieced it out, ran like this: 

It had been twelve years ago, when, according to the old files, Clark had financed Beverly Carlysle’s first starring venture.  He had, apparently, started out in the beginning only to give her the publicity she needed.  In devising it, however, he had shown a sort of boyish recklessness and ingenuity that had caught the interest of the press, and set newspaper men to chuckling wherever they got together.

He had got together a dozen or so of young men like himself, wealthy, idle and reckless with youth, and, headed by him, they had made the exploitation of the young star an occupation.  The newspapers referred to the star and her constellation as Beverly Carlysle and her Broadway Beauties.  It had been unvicious, young, and highly entertaining, and it had cost Judson Clark his membership in his father’s conservative old clubs.

For a time it livened the theatrical world with escapades that were harmless enough, if sensational.  Then, after a time, newspaper row began to whisper that young Clark was in love with the girl.  The Broadway Beauties broke up, after a wild farewell dinner.  The audiences ceased to expect a row of a dozen youths, all dressed alike with gardenias in their buttonholes and perhaps red neckties with their evening suits, to rise in their boxes on the star’s appearance and solemnly bow.  And the star herself lost a little of the anxious look she frequently wore.

The story went, after a while, that Judson Clark had been refused, and was taking his refusal badly.  Reporters saw him, carelessly dressed, outside the stage door waiting, and the story went that the girl had thrown him over, money and all, for her leading man.  One thing was clear; Clark, not a drinker before, had taken to drinking hard, and after a time, and some unpleasant scenes probably, she refused to see him any more.

When the play closed, in June, 1911, she married Howard Lucas, her leading man; his third wife.  Lucas had been not a bad chap, a good-looking, rather negligible man, given to all-day Sunday poker, carefully valeted, not very keen mentally, but amiable.  They had bought a house on East Fifty-sixth Street, and were looking for a new play with Lucas as co-star, when he unaccountably went to pieces nervously, stopped sleeping, and developed a slight twitching of his handsome, rather vacuous face.