“We’ll all come back and help,” said Weimer.

“Then I’ll never get away,” laughed Stuart.  He was radiant, happy, and excited, like a boy back from school for the holidays.  But when they had reached the pavement, he halted and ran his hand down into his pocket, as though feeling for his latch-key, and stood looking doubtfully at his friends.

“What is it now?” asked Rives, impatiently.  “Have you forgotten something?”

Stuart looked back at the front door in momentary indecision.

“Ye-es,” he answered.  “I did forget something.  But it doesn’t matter,” he added, cheerfully, taking Sloane’s arm.

“Come on,” he said, “and so Seldon made a hit, did he?  I am glad—­and tell me, old man, how long will we have to wait at Gib for the P. & O.?”

Stuart’s servant had heard the men trooping down the stairs, laughing and calling to one another as they went, and judging from this that they had departed for the night, he put out all the lights in the library and closed the piano, and lifted the windows to clear the room of the tobacco-smoke.  He did not notice the beautiful photograph sitting upright in the armchair before the fireplace, and so left it alone in the deserted library.

The cold night-air swept in through the open window and chilled the silent room, and the dead coals in the grate dropped one by one into the fender with a dismal echoing clatter; but the Picture still sat in the armchair with the same graceful pose and the same lovely expression, and smiled sweetly at the encircling darkness.

THE REPORTER WHO MADE HIMSELF KING

The Old Time Journalist will tell you that the best reporter is the one who works his way up.  He holds that the only way to start is as a printer’s devil or as an office boy, to learn in time to set type, to graduate from a compositor into a stenographer, and as a stenographer take down speeches at public meetings, and so finally grow into a real reporter, with a fire badge on your left suspender, and a speaking acquaintance with all the greatest men in the city, not even excepting Police Captains.

That is the old time journalist’s idea of it.  That is the way he was trained, and that is why at the age of sixty he is still a reporter.  If you train up a youth in this way, he will go into reporting with too full a knowledge of the newspaper business, with no illusions concerning it, and with no ignorant enthusiasms, but with a keen and justifiable impression that he is not paid enough for what he does.  And he will only do what he is paid to do.