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THAT ROYLE GIRL
105

Heminway, having glanced in, turned to meet Ellison, who shared Calvin's office.

"Boston about?" inquired Ellison, expectantly. He was a cheery Chicagoan, just thirty-two, stout, fair and florid as any Nordic, but with a bald spot and the need of eyeglasses.

"About?" replied Heminway. Boston, of course, was Calvin Clarke in the office vernacular. "He's all over the place and unusually low in his mind over us this mornang. He's got the Ketlar case."

"So I was just able to gather from the public prints on the train," said Ellison, who had week-ended in Geneva. "So it hit the Pilgrim son particularly hard, did it?"

Then, catching a glimpse of Boston, Ellison halted before he entered his and the Pilgrim son's office.

It had been remarked by him before, with what astonishing verity the features of a Puritan colonist had been inherited by Calvin Clarke. "Give him a Pilgrim hat and jerkin and knickerbockers and he might be William Bradford stepping on the Rock—or his own first ancestor," Ellison previously had said. And now again, looking at the man before the window, the likeness caught the Chicagoan; and it was not merely the physical reincarnation of spare, strong, hardy body and straight-featured face; it was the reincarnation of the character of the men and women of this man's blood on both sides for generations that held Ellison at the door and stabbed him with a sudden pang of envy.

Calvin looked about and, as suddenly as he had felt envy, the Chicagoan felt himself on the defensive for his city against "Boston," and he expressed it in the one way which Boston never understood.

"Well," he commented, as if proudly, and tossing away his hat casually, "they certainly notched up the old gun-