"I will, if it's not at a time when you'd be asleep."
"I'll not be asleep."
"You must be."
"I can't."
He extended his left hand, and she gave him first her tight hand and then, since their clasps did not meet, she put her left hand in his. "Good night; go to sleep, Joan Daisy," he said, scarcely able to speak for the pulse beat in his throat.
Downstairs, past Ketlar's door, Calvin tramped, driving his mind from to-morrow, when Ketlar would return to her awaiting him with her dream for him, her hands for him—her slender, soft, strong hands both of which Calvin had clasped Her lips would be Ketlar's too; and Calvin let himself imagine no more.
At the cab he turned before giving direction to the driver and looked up at her light. His glance roved about the building, and he was reminded of his feeling of offense at it. He felt none to-night. When he settled himself in the cab, and was driven away, he closed his eyes and was transported, instantly, to the ditch with Joan Daisy Royle beside him. He opened his eyes and saw a building, not that which contained her home, but one of the thousands like it, and he thought of her come from such a building; and in this and in the next perhaps and the next, some one else like her in a two-room, rented flat.
His thought traveled to his own home, to his mother, to the table on Thanksgiving Day with Cousin Harriet and his walk alone in the wood toward Haverhill, where his great, great, great grandmother Selina, Timothy's wife, had fought the Indians after Timothy had fallen. There was no family portrait of Selina and in the family record no personal description of her; so Calvin always had supposed her tall, broad-shouldered and brown-haired
