Page:That Royle Girl (Balmer).pdf/51



another night than Saturday, which this happened to be, Mr. Clarke of the state's attorney's office would have been one of the innumerable citizens asleep under the roofs reaching away to the west and to the south and to the southeast, following the accrescent curve of the beach below the midnight moon. His rooms were in a building which presided over an area of park, a bit of boulevard, an outer strip of grass and garden abutting abruptly upon a wave-washed escarpment of concrete which continued the shore some five miles closer to the old center of the city.

Mr. Clarke's rooms composed, actually, an apartment; for they had no connection with other suites in the tall brick and stone structure. He had occupied the apartment for more than two years; consequently it constituted a most fixed and permanent establishment in comparison to Joan Daisy Royle's "home." But Clarke spoke of the apartment, because he always thought of it as "my rooms," in the same manner in which he had referred to his rooms in Perkins Hall, Cambridge, Massachusetts, when he had been attending Harvard Law School.

Now, as then, when any one inquired, "Where is your home?" It never occurred to him to mention the location of his rooms. He replied, "My home is at Clarke's Ferry." And since he had come to Chicago, he usually added, "It's in Massachusetts, near Haverhill."

Calvin Clarke was his name, as Calvin Clarke had been the recorded name of the stubborn, adventurous colonist who had cleared and settled and staked his stockade in the forest frontier on the south bank of the Merrimac,