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THAT ROYLE GIRL
185

returned to their very recent day in court and their minutes alone, afterwards, in the empty court-room.

With eyes closed, he absorbed himself in this reverie and when he had come to the end, he would retraverse it all again; but he found that such a satisfying reverie, like a dream, was not to be commanded. It had come and gone; and he sat up to realization.

"I'm on this train because of her," he said to himself. "I left Chicago because of her. I'm going away from her."

He bent forward and abstracted from his portfolio the pages of evidence against her which reported her intimacy with Ketlar and cited the unescapable inferences to be drawn therefrom. Calvin Clarke deliberately reread these ugly pages for the purpose of exorcising from him his longing for that girl; but he succeeded only in arousing himself further, so he desisted.

In the morning, he was amid the green mountains of Massachusetts. The very air seemed sterner and the sight of the slopes stirred recollections of traditions of the Clarkes. He emerged from the train at Boston as self-contained as any one who faced the bleak wind blowing in from the bay with the smell of the sea.

He had some time between trains and he had considered dropping in on some of his classmates in their Boylston Street law offices or Federal Street banks, but at the last moment he decided to wander about alone, passing Old North Church, the old State House and King's Chapel.

He felt a hunger for the old, the really old, after his second year in Chicago; but when he had exhausted his hour, he was sorry he had not called on Boylston Street, for he had encountered no one whom he knew, and his solitary expedition reminded him of days with his father,