Page:That Royle Girl (Balmer).pdf/70

 avenue. The street was bewilderingly the same as it had been two hours ago when Joan Daisy visited the shore, drawing with her the moon.

It had moved to the west and so was casting a longer shadow before Joan Daisy. Another long shadow lay before the stranger towering at her shoulder, the man who had come in the name of the State, but who was no better than the police in recognizing truth.

He was bent upon convicting Ket, upon killing Ket for the murder of Adele, which Ket never, never could have done! How could she affect this calm, confident man who possessed such power—the very power of life and death over Ket?

She glanced up at him and found him gazing down at her.

The reporter's question, "How much was she in it?", pressed for answer in Calvin's mind as he approached the corner near which was the apartment he had first visited to-night; and Joan Daisy, looking up at him and with the reporter's query in her ears, guessed why he stared at her.

"You didn't tell him," she said. "How much was I in it, do you believe? Tell me!"

He studied her face in the moonlight; he glanced down her slight, lovely figure; he thought, without meaning to, of her white heels and her slim, pretty feet; then he thought of her in Ketlar's arms, as she so graphically had depicted herself; he recollected Adele, lying dead with the spots of rouge on her pale cheeks; and he looked away.

"Where do you want me to go with you?" he asked.

"Across to the beach."

"Why?"

She did not answer and he observed that she was looking up at the sky. Suddenly she halted.