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104
THAT ROYLE GIRL

tionalism, but to Calvin Clarke it was the business of enforcing the fundamental, and yet failing, discipline of the State. Ofter he felt, when he was at work within this grim, gray, ill-furnished building, that he was in the very citadel of American civilization; here he protected the palladium of order and law brought to America long ago by his fathers and which the people of to-day would, if they could, throw down and destroy.

It being Monday morning, the calendars of all the courts were crowded, and ceaseless lines of felons, manacled to police, the attorneys who would defend them, witnesses for them—their fathers, mothers, friends—pushed through the doorways hoping to cheat the law. Citizens, called for jury service, weighted the elevators for the courts—American citizens all, though to-day, undoubtedly, they would free, on the flimsiest of excuses or the most maudlin of emotions, robbers, extortioners, murderers.

Yes, murderers especially they were wont to free and most particularly when there was a pretty girl to ogle them from the witness stand.

Calvin, pushing back from the papers which he had prepared, imagined the appearance of Joan Daisy Royle before a jury of these weaklings, hearing the case of Ketlar; and while he was thus imagining, young Heminway, from the next office, looked in.

Heminway was one of the assistant state's attorneys who had been born in Chicago, raised and educated there and consequently, to Calvin's mind, he accepted as natural and inevitable an appalling prevalence of crime.

On the other hand, Calvin's feeling of personal possessiveness for the country, which Arthur Todd had observed, had not escaped the young men born in Chicago who coöperated with Calvin in assisting the state's attorney.