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 She assailed herself with: "I shouldn't care. If he wants her and doesn't want me, it's better for me to know it now." But dismay seized her and she felt hollow with a sensation as if, physically, some one had scooped out her soul. "What'll I do? What'll I do?"

She heard Myra speaking to Lan and she heard him reply and heard, too, Bill Fraser saying: "Come on; all together again!"

Myra was pretending for her, and all the rest of them were pretending that they must hurry on account of the cold; but they all knew that Fidelia and Dave would be suffering no more than they, themselves, on the shore ice.

Some one with a torch swung the beam of light, as if by accident, upon Alice's face. She did not care what they saw; she could not consider their opinions; she felt her life dependent upon this hour. He was her life, he who had leaped away from her, never looking back, when he had the call to go to Fidelia Netley. It was not that he went, it was the way he went which appalled her. He had made, at that moment, nothing of their three and a half years of companionship, nothing of their betrothal. She had seen him last when she was in the water and he was skating away, away. She did not believe that he knew she had fallen into the water; she would almost have liked to believe it. No; she knew that from the instant he decided to go he had shut his mind to her. To her, struggling there in the water, had come realization of his ecstasy at going from her to be again with Fidelia Netley.

"She stayed out on purpose," Myra accused.

Alice would not have that, even in her despair.