NICK CARTER STORIES _Issued Weekly. Entered as Second-class Matter at the New York Post Office, by_ STREET & SMITH, _79-89 Seventh Ave., New York. Copyright, 1915, by_ STREET & SMITH. _O. G. Smith and G. C. Smith, Proprietors._ =Terms to NICK CARTER STORIES Mail Subscribers.= (_Postage Free._) =Single Copies or Back Numbers, 5c. Each.= 3 months 65c. One year $2.50 4 months 85c. 2 copies one year 4.00 6 months $1.25 1 copy two years 4.00 =How to Send Money=--By post-office or express money order, registered letter, bank check or draft, at our risk. At your own risk if sent by currency, coin, or postage stamps in ordinary letter. =Receipts=--Receipt of your remittance is acknowledged by proper change of number on your label. If not correct you have not been properly credited, and should let us know at once. =No. 141.= NEW YORK, May 22, 1915. =Price Five Cents.= THE DUPLICATE NIGHT; Or, NICK CARTER’S DOUBLE REFLECTION. Edited by CHICKERING CARTER. CHAPTER I. THE DUPLICATE NIGHT. It was a fateful moment--one to be remembered. A fateful moment in the lives and fortunes of some to whom there then came no premonition of evil, no dread of the terrible sword that hung by a hair above their heads, upon whom was cast no shadow through the glare and glitter around them, amid the gay festivities in which each played a part. It was a fateful moment, one brought only by chance to the notice of Nick Carter. It was remembered by the celebrated detective, moreover, only because of two incidents that would have been entirely unnoticed by a less keen and discerning man. One was the single stroke of a tall, old-fashioned clock in the main hall of the great mansion. It struck the half after ten. The hall in which it struck, and in which Nick Carter then was standing, was that of the magnificent Carrington mansion on Washington Heights, the home of the wealthy railway magnate, Horace K. Carrington, a millionaire fifty times over, and prominent with his handsome wife in the most fashionable and exclusive circles of New York society. It was the night of the fifteenth of January, memorable for an unusual warm spell of more than a week, which had melted the last vestige of snow and drawn the last sign of frost from the ground. It was also memorable as the night of a private masked ball in the Carrington mansion, in which something like three hundred of their most intimate friends had gathered. The avenue and streets adjoining the extensive estate were thronged with conveyances of the most expensive kinds, limousines, and costly motor cars predominating.