say, slip me the straight of it, and I'll use it only in a nice way. You threw him down; you must've. Why?"
"I didn't throw him down," denied Joan Daisy. "We went off to lunch to—to talk over the trial. He wanted to thank me for what I did with you."
"Applesauce!" graphically interjected Oliver, but, getting nothing better out of her, he assured her, "That's all right with me if you don't tell the other papers what happened."
She did not, though many other reporters telephoned. Nobody else called; none of the neighbors; nor did Mr. Hoberg call; for the news from Waukegan reached Chicago too late to be included in the evening editions. So Hoberg was counting Joan Royle out of his calculations; and mamma, after shopping, dropped into a tea-room for the refreshment of hot chocolate and frosted cakes, confident that Daisy was Mrs. Frederic Ketlar and sure to be exceedingly prosperous, at least for a while. Dads, alone among Joan's friends, nourished a contrary conception.
No one else, upon that evening, so firmly fixed in his mind the belief that Joan Royle was Ketlar's wife, as did Calvin Clarke; no one dwelt with the idea, comparably. He shut himself in his rooms, and to-night not even his work distracted him nor could he, by driving himself to routine tasks, disguise the turmoil of his mind. How had he not seen, at the very first, the soul of Joan—Ketlar, he had made himself add the name in his thought. Why had he denied and put down impulses to trust her which had seized him, momentarily, throughout his association with her; when she had shown him her stars in the sand; when she had tried to awaken her father and mother . . . when she had asked him to buy the Barsoni book . . . at a dozen other times.
He had imagined that he, if any one, dealt in the simple
