The Breaking Point - Page 23/275

"You drink this and come to bed, David," she said peremptorily. "I've

been lying upstairs waiting for you to come up, and I need some sleep."

He had no sort of hope that she would not notice the book.

"I just got to thinking things over, Lucy," he explained, his tone

apologetic. "There's no use pretending I'm not worried. I am."

"Well, it's in God's hands," she said, quite simply. "Take this up and

drink it slowly. If you gulp it down it makes a lump in your stomach."

She stood by while he replaced the book in the bookcase and put out the

lights. Then in the darkness she preceded him up the stairs.

"You'd better take the milk yourself, 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."