CHAPTER XX
Joan Daisy spread her sheets and blankets over the couch which Mr. Clarke had pulled out for her. She dropped off her dress and lay down without slipping under the bed-covers, while she looked about, wide-eyed with realization of how nearly it had happened that she was never to have seen this room again!
She arose and opened softly her mother's door, seeing as she expected, that Dads was absent and mamma soundly slept. She closed the door, and with her hand on the knob her mind followed Mr. Clarke to a hospital.
How nearly it had happened that he was never to return to that old home of his in Massachusetts where the hollyhocks grew so straight against the white fence, and his mother stood so calm and dignified in the garden! How nearly it had happened that mamma, in this next room, and the calm, straight-standing mother of Calvin Clarke were to have received the same news from a ditch outside Chicago!
Joan Daisy undressed and went to bed, but lay wide awake with her thoughts leaping through the events of the night, of the trial, of her meetings with Calvin Clarke in the empty court-room, in the automat and here, in her room, on the night of her arrest. Now he knew himself to be wrong, all wrong about her; and wrong, too, about Ket. So he will free Ket to-morrow.
Her mind went to Ket, who lay to-night in his cell in jail, not knowing that, whatever the jury voted, he was sure to be freed; she thought of him on his cot, wide-eyed in the dark and clutching his blanket as he imagined, as surely at moments he must, that the State, Mr. Clarke's State, would sentence him to death.
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