Page:That Royle Girl (Balmer).pdf/327

 like many women of his family and of the type of Melicent Webster. Closing his eyes, he saw the scene in the woods and he saw Selina, a small, quick, dark-haired girl who snatched up the gun and fought.

The taxi swung down Sheridan Road toward the north entrance to Lincoln Park, and the moon shone on a man upon horseback with the horse reared and the man swung over in the saddle rallying and calling to his troops. It was Sheridan stopping the rout on the road from Winchester: "You're going the wrong way, boys! Turn; turn; you're going back!"

In bronze, he rode; eternally there, at the end of the boulevard which bore his name, he rallied and inspired his troops, for all to see who passed in cars and taxis and in motor-busses, too, on the way in and out to Wilson Avenue.

Where the road again turned, stood Abraham Lincoln, the son of Illinois. And who had Calvin Clarke, in all the list of his fathers from Queen Anne's war to Antietam, to equal him? With Schubert and Beethoven, Wagner and Mozart in letters of stone, stood Lincoln in this home of Joan Royle's which was no two-room flat, but was all the city.

What difference that no blood of theirs flowed in her veins? What difference that no brittle Bible recorded physical descent from them? Her soul they had molded and made.