I opened my eyes. I looked up. Somebody was shaking me--Archie Beaupré.
"You don't mean to say that you're awake? I admire your hours."
"Is it late?"
"I don't know what you call late. It's nearly one. Do you generally sleep to this time?"
"Made rather a night of it, my boy. It was five when I left the Climax."
"Oh, you went to the Climax, did you, after you left Jardine's? Win?"
"A trifle. What brings you here--starting in the early-calling line?"
Archie seated himself on the bed, murmuring--
"He calls this early."
Beaupré is the third son of the Duke of Glenlivet--one of the duke's famed thirteen. Not a bad sort--stone broke, like all the rest of us. Archie was born in two different sections--one-half of him makes all for wickedness, and the other half makes all the other way--and, whichever half of him is to the fore, he's thorough. Jardine and I had found him in the drawing-room with Dora when we had finished our hobnobbing--at which I was not sorry. When a man has had the sort of talk with the father which I had had, he is not, on the instant, all agog for a tête-à-tête with the child. He wants to straighten things out inside his head a bit. We had left the Jardines together, Beaupré and I. He had gone to some twenty-third cousin of his great grandmother--the man's relations are as the sands of the sea for multitude, and he keeps in with every one of them--and I had gone on to the Climax Club. Now, I wondered what he wanted on my bed.