Page:That Royle Girl (Balmer).pdf/188

 A couple of the jury finally got you, I figured—the gray-haired one and the one on the end with spectacles, who was always taking notes. It looked to me that they got you, partly at least; what do you think?"

"What?" said Calvin, amazed again by her capacity for personal inquiry.

"What do you think?" she repeated. "It looked to me that a couple of 'em got you, at last; but not when you were speaking; when Mr. Heminway was. I think I got you, mostly, then. There was such a difference."

"You got me," repeated Calvin.

"Of course I know you a lot better than the jury; maybe I'm wrong, and they didn't get you at all. I couldn't help thinking, when you were speaking, that if some one 'ud just explain you a little—pass around those pictures of your home, with all that history below it, they'd see what you were driving at."

"What?" asked Calvin again.

Joan Daisy burned red, recollecting the circumstances under which she had seen the pictures and which she knew she must not report. "The pictures in the paper when you first came out here—your old house with your mother in the front yard and 1722—and Queen Anne's war and Timothy Clarke and John Adams' administration—and Antietam."

Calvin glowed as she mentioned thus associations enshrined to him. In contrast he recalled the slighting levity with which his partner, at a dance club, had referred to "the ancesterancestor [sic] shot up by the noble aborigine on the same spot where the matutinal beans are still baked, and all that."

He said nothing, and the Royle girl gazed out at the city. "The State," she said, with a thrill in her voice, "is certainly a lot of people. Even the city is an awful lot."