Page:That Royle Girl (Balmer).pdf/182



"The Clarke homestead, Clarke's Ferry, Massachusetts. The present north wing was built by the second Calvin Clarke in 1722 and stands upon the site of the original cabin erected by his grandfather, seventy years earlier, and which was burned during Queen Anne's war.

"Here lived also Colonel Calvin Clarke, of the staff of General Henry Knox; Jeremy Clarke, who in John Adams' administration . . . the abolitionist, Timothy Clarke, who fell at Antietam. . . ."

Joan Daisy Royle, daughter of mamma, who was soundly sleeping off veronal in the third floor flat above the second entrance, and daughter of Dads—maybe, but she did not know—suddenly ceased to read. Her defiant contempt for Calvin Clarke for being a ready-made was fled from her; and she felt choked by a queer yearning which drew her eyes again to the ancient, unchanging home of Calvin Clarke and of his fathers before him in their long, honorable, remembered succession; and she steeped her soul in the peace of the place.

So this was his home, the home of the Mr. Clarke who had come to her home to arrest her on the night Adele had been killed. He had this home where his family had lived for two hundred and seventy years. Burnt in Queen Anne's War. When was that? Joan Daisy did not know. There had been no motion picture about it, that she remembered. But she would look up Queen Anne's War.

"Where is your home?" echoed in her head the question which Mr. Clarke had put to her on that night in the rented room off Dads' and mamma's, where she had the convertible couch and the rest of the furniture, got on credit and unpaid-for. First Calvin Clarke had asked her, "Where do you live?"

"Live? Why, here," she had answered; and he had