Page:That Royle Girl (Balmer).pdf/168

 by moments of embarrassment when he thought of his performance in the automat. Not being given to evasion, and least of all to self-evasion, he squarely realized that he had sought the Royle girl and followed her when he found her for his personal desire to be with her; that he had wanted to remain with her longer, and now he wanted to see her again.

He had laid her money, with the list of books, upon his dressing-table, where he spread out the little slip of paper upon which she had written. He was sure that the writing was hers, because she had said that a man had waited upon her at Lyon and Healy's, and this handwriting surely was a girl's; more than that, it was like her—clear, direct, vigorous, individual and feminine. He picked up the slip and imagined the pencil in her slim, white, impulsive fingers. He touched her money and mentally he deducted it from her weekly pay.

Switching off his lights, he raised the window blind and gazed out over the city, at the nightly miracle of three millions of people established upon this shore under the gossamer of the refulgent haze hanging above their gleaming, endless avenues and boulevards and roofs.

He felt, as he gazed up at the towers and looming bulk of the larger buildings, how stupendously this city dwarfed Boston and it recurred to him, as an incredible fact, that at the time when Jeremy Clarke had become a public prosecutor in Boston, there had been no settlement here. Not even the first block-house of Fort Dearborn, which later was to be burnt by the Indians, then had been built. And Jeremy Clarke's name was one of those which stood in the less faded ink upon the later pages of the family record. Calvin knew two women and one man who remembered Jeremy. To think that, in Jeremy's time, there had been nothing here but a sandy