This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
308
THAT ROYLE GIRL

vindication of her friendship with Ket, for which she had endured insult and humiliation throughout the months since Ket had been jailed, but she sought satisfaction in no renewing of her hours with him; no moment with him made seizure of her soul. She looked down at her silk slippers and Calvin Clarke's blunt boots, and she recalled how he had appeared at first to her when he had come for the People of Illinois to question her, and she, trusting to him, had told him the whole truth, but immediately he had approved the arrest of Ket for murder and had ordered her held as an accomplice.

How she had hated that Mr. Clarke! She did not hate the Calvin Clarke with blood-streaked face and with arm helpless because it had been caught under the back of the seat over which he had bent to press her to the floor of the car; she did not hate the Mr. Clarke who had pleaded, "Down, keep down, Joan Daisy," when he and she were pursued and who had called to her to wait, before she had started to the road, while he acknowledged that he had been wrong, all wrong about her.

She had beaten him and "shown him up" as completely as Oliver, in her long-ago ride to Tut's Temple, had prophesied that she would do, but she felt no joy of triumph over him. Pangs of triumph thrilled her breast, but it was triumph over what she had done with Calvin Clarke and for him in his cause against those who had tried to kill him and her to-night.

The truck slowed and she trembled, drawing nearer to him, as she imagined another meeting with gunmen; but the stop was at sight of a Chicago policeman and in obedience to Mr. Clarke's directions to halt at the first city patrol box.

Calvin arose and, without accepting help either from Joan Royle or the patrolman, he made a report over the police telephone wire, relating who he was, who was with