Page:That Royle Girl (Balmer).pdf/137



Calvin received report of her hour with Elmen, he learned merely that Joan Daisy Royle had visited the lawyer; for the plain-clothes man, who watched her, had not ventured to follow into Elmen's office. However, the bare report of her call was enough for Calvin. He knew, now, that her course of coaching was commenced.

He knew, too, that Ketlar was being coached whenever Elmen entered the jail and procured for his client the right of secret conference with attorney which the law assures every accused person.

To Calvin, this meant that Ketlar and the Royle girl were being drilled and rehearsed, as though for theatrical parts, in order to make such appearance and to swear to such testimony at the trial as Elmen believed would prove most effective. Gone was any opportunity for the State to catch Ketlar and the Royle girl in further contradictions.

"The Royle girl," Calvin habitually said, when referring to her, utilizing the common phrase of the newspapers. Occasionally a news column printed her entire name, Joan Daisy Royle, or mentioned her, familiarly, as Joan Daisy; but the dignity of "Miss Royle" was not now to be extended to her; so the newspapers, forbidden by their own convention from referring to a girl, slurringly, simply as "Royle," resorted to the three words.

Upon his tongue, they roused in Calvin subtle excitements; and he became conscious of purposely repeating the derogatory phrase for the peculiar stir it whipped within him. As "the Royle girl," he referred to her severely in a letter to his mother which he wrote on