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 lay for you somewhere else. Too much chance for us here."

Calvin's head was awhirl with his unsettled certainties tumbling over one another; he tried to arrange his thoughts, rallying them to some new idea upon which he could depend; and he raised, for the rallying point, a conception of the Royle girl, clean and true.

He could not know how she, out of the welter of evil in her environment, could have emerged as he at last had found her to be; but, lying there under the car, he knew that she had seen, not Ketlar but Baretta, in the window of Adele Ketlar's flat, and that Joan Daisy Royle had nothing whatever to do with the murder, but that she had visited the shore that night, as she had told him, following some dream of her own wherein she had laid the stones in the sand in the pattern of stars in the sky.

He felt her trying to better his position. "I'm all right," he said; then he heard her crawling out. "Where are you going?"

"To look around."

She did so and reported, "Nobody's in sight."

He felt a scarcely perceptible shift of the pressure upon him, and he knew that she was trying to lift the wreck. She recognized the impossibility of this and desisted, sensibly, when he spoke to her.

"I'll bring help from the road," she said.

"Look out for th' road," warned Neski.

"Go to a house," said Calvin; then he said, "Wait."

"What is it?"

"I've been wrong about you, all wrong, wrong," he acknowledged to her.

He heard no reply but a footstep and whether nearer to him or away, he did not know; soon he heard her steps cracking the crust between the furrows as she hurried off. He quivered with cold and with fear when she was gone,