Page:That Royle Girl (Balmer).pdf/106

 Tell me about him, Daisy; and rub deeper—deeper right there. That's good. . . . Now tell me about that nice looking lawyer Clarke."

"He's not nice looking," Daisy denied, with a sudden vengefulness, which surprised herself. "He's mister-God looking! He thinks he's mister God!" she cried out. "He's one of those essential citizens, mamma; he's one that packs the country on his back and the rest of us are dirt."

While Joan Daisy was thus making outcry to mamma against Calvin Clarke, he was engaged in like manner with denunciation of her to his mother. For he had returned to his rooms and was alone and, since it was Sunday evening, it was time for his regular letter.

Before beginning to write, he always imagined, according to the season, where his mother would be and what she would be doing when she should receive his letter on Tuesday morning.

This letter, he thought, would be delivered to her in the gate garden—the old, perennial garden by the white picket fence in front of the house, where the marigold and late chrysanthemum would be in bloom in the warm, October sunlight and where cosmos dotted delicate tints along the garden's edge.

"The gate garden," Calvin repeated to himself aloud for the pleasure and pride of the words; for this designation of the garden was more than two hundred years old, having been written in a diary of the date of 1722, proving that the Clarkes had had a garden on that spot when a stockade followed the later line of the picket fence and that the original log gate had swung over the arc of the light, latticed barrier of to-day.

Calvin imagined his mother with garden shears in hand clipping the stems of cosmos and marigold for the table and glancing down the lane for old Santry, the