Page:Fidelia, (IA fidelia00balm).pdf/137

 first break in the ice, he had shut his thought to every one behind. "I'm away; away!"

Now he almost resented that fire. It could be of no use; and under no circumstances could it have been of any service. There were thousands of lights marking the shore; and the bonfire could satisfy no purpose of warmth. If Fidelia and he reached the shore, and especially if they had fallen into water and were freezing, they would not stop at the fire but would go into the house. No; the fire, which surely was Alice's, had been built for another reason. Alice had lit it to keep him in mind of her. So he looked away from it.

Before it flamed up, he had had a moment of exuberance and, before that, a sensation of gayety strange to the serious, earnest person who was David Herrick. Fidelia Netley had brought both to him. Always, from their first meeting, she had the pleasant power to take him out of that distraint person who had been himself. She had begun it by setting him to saying surprising, perverse things to her and then startling him into the amazement of following her to the shore at sunrise and putting him to play with her in the caves of the cliffs of ice.

Not one of these things had she intended; she could not have imagined them, in advance, more than could he. And he knew that she had never intended this, more than he; but here he was with her, "away"—away from every one else and all the world once more.

He looked back at Alice's fire—the faint, red flicker on the shore. It had become so futile now that he ceased to resent it. His thought went from Alice by the road of wondering who might be, at this