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THAT ROYLE GIRL
47

discipline and decency which these many-bloods never knew!

The worst of it was that these people not only broke the law but afterwards they went free. A girl shot her husband or a husband slew his wife, and weak-minded jurors of their own kidney sat in their judgment and acquitted them.

But Calvin Clarke determined that Ketlar should not go free. Calvin thought, "He's counting on an acquittal, undoubtedly. He's scheming out his defense now. More probably he arranged it beforehand. He'll have an alibi all ready."

Calvin drove from the suburbs onto the boulevards of the city, and as he neared his destination and huge, continuous blocks of dwellings rose upon his right and upon his left, the aspect, the idea and the very atmosphere of the place antagonized him. He thought how endlessly these prodigious blocks lay over the land, spreading their one-room, two-room, three- and four-room shelter over the city gypsies crowding this circle of shore and who called their encampments of brick and plaster "homes." Millions of many-blood nomads, boasting themselves Americans!

He summoned a vision of his home in the bend of the Merrimac where Calvin Clarke had settled in 1652; he saw the old white house with the sun-dial over the door that had shadowed the hour in days before Washington journeyed to Boston. He saw on the walls of the library the portraits of his fathers, and on the shelves the books which kept record of their honorable, useful and disciplined lives.

Looking up at the new, crude, crowded buildings beside him, he searched the lighted panes of the transoms for the number of the especial building in which to-night some one—probably her husband—had shot a girl.