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THAT ROYLE GIRL

he carried, to make it appear that he had forgotten an important paper. But he might have spared himself this bit of pretense, because the plain-clothes man, for whose benefit it was enacted, had disappeared.

This must mean that the Royle girl had come out and, reckoning that she probably had gone to the street car line, Calvin hastened to Clark Street, where he saw her standing on a corner waiting for a car.

At the distance of half a block, she was unmistakable; her slender figure would be unmistakable, Calvin thought, at any distance at which she could be seen at all.

Even when she stood almost motionless on the corner, her posture and the lift of her head evinced a spirit which, in spite of him, set Calvin's pulses to prickling.

A car approached and halted; quickly she stepped up and was lost upon the rear platform, as a man ran from a cigar-store and boarded the car at the front. The fellow was the same who had spoken to Calvin before the jail, and Calvin imagined the man working his way rearward in the car to keep an unsuspected eye upon that small, spirited figure.

Calvin returned, thoughtfully, to his office where he ventured casually to Ellison: "Does it seem to you that we're getting much on the Royle girl?"

"We're getting nothing at all; that is, nothing more," replied Ellison promptly. "Plenty of past, apparently, but an eminently proper present. Discretion only faintly suggests the spirit of Joan Daisy Royle's doings in these days. She means to save Ketlar, if she has to watch herself every second until the trial's over; so you'll see no slip from her until the verdict's in."

"Then it's rather a waste of time to observe her."

"That's what I'd say."

Consequently, surveillance of the Royle girl was relaxed with a resultant effect upon Calvin Clarke which