Page:That Royle Girl (Balmer).pdf/109

 mind and soul absorbed by emotion roused by Joan Daisy Royle, daughter of a drug addict, accomplice of Ketlar, false swearer and defier of the law and challenger of Calvin Clarke.

Over the lake stood stars and his eyes sought a patch of them configuring the constellation which Joan Daisy had shaped in stones on the sand.

Calvin stirred to rills of warm blood at memory of her voice when first she met and challenged him, her eyes even to his, her head up.

"What's the matter with me?" he arraigned the thumping in his breast, and turned toward his rooms, determined to dismiss her and the whole affair of Ketlar until to-morrow.

But a woman awaited him outside his building. She was alone, and she stood quietly, never moving when Calvin approached. She was middle-aged or more, he saw, with a fine, straight figure endowed in the dark with a brooding dignity which impelled Calvin to remove his hat.

"You are Assistant State's Attorney Clarke?" she asked.

"Yes."

"I am Anna Ketlar Folwell. I am his mother."

"What?" said Calvin.

"I'm his mother."

"Oh," said Calvin and, believing that the dark deceived him, he moved to have a better light upon her; and he supposed that he was in for a painful and utterly useless ordeal; but the woman only said, in a low voice:

"I've come just about his child. A neighbor has her now, one of Adele's neighbors."

"Yes."

"Can—can't I have her?"

"Her grandmother," said Calvin, choosing his word