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 She said nothing profound; that was it! She never even tried to; the idea of being profound could not occur to her. She thought and said wholly natural, agreeable things, not like any one else. "She's just natural," he said to himself and soon he felt the corollary to it: "No one else I ever knew was natural."

Not even Alice; no. He thought how he had tried to throw off the constraint of his father's ideas when he had seized Alice that night he halted her car by the graveyard and how she, though she submitted to him, had been more afraid than he for himself and how she had doubted him.

He thought: "Suppose I'd had her in my arms!" This "her" was the girl now beside him. The idea, tremendously stirred him. He tried to forbid it, therefore, but it returned and returned. He thought: "Fidelia, she would have made me sure!"

He was amazingly untired though now, as the height of the sword of Orion showed, it was midnight. In the north, the Dipper tipped in its turn about the Pole star. All the heavens were sparkling clear and still with the silences of space. Calm had come upon the lake when the west wind had dropped to a varying breeze made mild from its journey over open water.

Hours ago Fidelia and Dave had lost the land sounds and now they drifted so far that separate lights upon the shore no longer could be identified. There was the aura of Chicago to the south; there was the streak of Sheridan Road. Somewhere on that strip of beach were the Sothrons' windows but they had become so distant that they bothered Dave no longer. Alice's useless bonfire had burnt out.