Page:Fidelia, (IA fidelia00balm).pdf/144

 "No, she didn't!" Alice thought: "How easy for me if she planned these things; how easy, if she meant to do them!" But she believed that Fidelia had planned this as little as she had planned the shaft of sunlight across her hair when she sat in the class-room, as little as she could have planned, when she went to the lake to see the sunrise, to draw David after her.

Alice heard the voice of her father. He had just come from the city and had learned what had happened, but he did not understand it. He put his arm about Alice.

"Go back to the house, baby," he said. "I'll see to this."

"You can't! . . . Papa, papa, don't make me go in!"

He asked her; "What's the matter?"

She told him: "He went to her! When the ice blew out, he went to her!"

Her father argued: "Of course he went! It's what you'd want him to do!"

"Not that way, papa! You didn't see!" And she freed herself from his arm.

Something about this, her evading his clasp, affected him more. "I won't do," he realized. It made him feel how she wanted David's clasp when she would not bear his; and he thought: "No one else will ever do."

He stayed a few paces from her, watching her. He reckoned: "She's twenty-two. That's the age her mother married." And his feeling summoned memory of his wife, when she was twenty-two and he became her husband. He recollected what he had learned of the love within his wife's heart which she had never let