Page:That Royle Girl (Balmer).pdf/194

 her list of books which she believed would make Ketlar a Mozart. Calvin put a hand into that pocket. Within it, was a smaller pocket to preserve articles such as slips of paper; and a bit of folded paper was in that small pocket, as Calvin Clarke very well knew.

He drew it out and, as the car lights were turned on, he unfolded the slip and examined again the Royle girl's writing; and the definiteness of it, the character of her spirit roused agreeable warmth within him.

He pulled a portfolio from the opposite seat and extracted a bundle of papers having to do with the Ketlar case; but he ignored the legal sheets and examined a newspaper picture of the Royle girl.

After he put it away, he sat deliberately reviewing his encounters with her from the first, when she had confronted him, head up, challenging him for his right to come for the State; when he had followed her upstairs, from Ketlar's room to hers, and her slim white heels rose from her slippers; when he had walked with her to the beach, where she showed him the stones which she called stars, and they returned and she attempted to awaken her mother or father and could not.

He revisited, in reverie, the hotel room where she had sat at the little table and offered him coffee with her pretty, white hands and he had refused, and she called him a ready-made—and he had torn the notes which Eller, the stenographer, had written.

He rehearsed their few words after he had freed her, their encounter in court with Elmen, their meeting again outside the grand jury room, when she had clasped his wrist till her nail cut his skin. He recollected, in its order, his glimpse of her as she left the jail; and he dwelt, in deliberate detail, on the meeting in the automat and on the street, when she asked him to buy the Barsoni book, with her three dollars and fifty cents. Thus he