Page:Elizabeth Jordan--Tales of the city room.djvu/200

 she had slept such deep, untroubled sleep in those peaceful days that seemed a thousand years ago. Perhaps her mother slept there to-night, dreaming of her "little girl" all alone in far-away New York. A great wave of homesickness swept over the newspaper woman as she came back with a shock to the present.

At his official desk, the night city editor was scowling over some telegrams which had been placed before him. Herforth, the star reporter, had finished a page "special" and was executing a small and quiet jig beside his chair by way of "restoring his circulation," as he put it. Several others were collecting and paging the scattered leaves of their copy, preparatory to handing it in, while a number of less fortunate reporters worked on hurriedly with an occasional anxious glance at the clock. Over the whole room hung the tense atmosphere of a newspaper office late at night. In the nervous depression of the moment Miss Bancroft forgot the brighter side of her work, of which she was keenly appreciative in her normal frame of mind. Her dark