Page:Fidelia, (IA fidelia00balm).pdf/151

 Gone also, was the light of the searching row-boat. It always was so far away that, when at last it gave up and went in, Fidelia and Dave felt more relief than anything else. They were glad that they no longer were causing others danger and discomfort.

Dave himself felt little discomfort, being warmly dressed in a heavy suit with a sweater under his coat. He was sure that Fidelia was less warm.

"With this on?" she exclaimed when he argued with her.

"This" was a shaggy sport skirt and jacket with woolen vest. She had knitted gloves, almost as heavy as his; and she wore a white tarn. She explained that she wore these at Minneapolis "when it got really cold, not just barely freezing like to-night."

She added "Imagine me cold!"

Dave couldn't imagine it; her splendid body must always be warm.

It was for Fidelia a night when she felt like going to the point of exhaustion, when she gloried in giving herself to the sensation of spending her strength and feeling how much more she had to spend. She enjoyed this sensation particularly in company; and in David Herrick she found endurance equal to her own.

Her impulse of self-reproach at bringing him here, had passed; he was with her because he wanted to be, instead of being with Alice Sothron in that warm house now lost amid the lights of the distant shore. Fidelia did not feel herself to blame more than she had been to blame for his following her to the shore for the sunrise.

Since people blamed her for that, likely they would