Page:That Royle Girl (Balmer).pdf/365

 "Don't go in," he begged her.

"Why not?"

"Please don't."

"What will we do?" she asked, with that intimate we on her tongue again.

"We," he took it and repeated it, "we'll walk along."

"Where?"

"I don't know. I don't care much. Do you?" he asked her so humbly that she looked up at him quickly and saw, beyond any doubt, that he knew what he was doing and wanted to do it.

"I don't care," she said, with her breast aflutter.

"Would you like luncheon somewhere?" he asked her.

"At an automat?" she flung at him and struck him so fiery red that she flushed from contrition. "I didn't mean that," she said.

"You should have. I deserved it."

"Do you really want lunch?" she asked.

"No; do you?"

"No."

So Calvin Clarke, of Clarke's Ferry, Massachusetts, and Joan Daisy Royle walked along the city street. He sought, as she very well knew, a place to be alone with her, but he was totally untrained in the technique of obtaining privacy for a girl with himself in the city. Her home would not do; for Dads and mamma would be there; and he could not suggest a house of his friends, as he had the other night. So they passed block after block until they came to the lake-front park at the Art Institute.

It was a pay day and not yet noon, so he realized that within must be many rooms where no one wandered. "Come in here, Joan Daisy," he asked, and with trembling fingers he paid their admission.

Old articles and paintings, reminders of the past, sur-