Page:Fidelia, (IA fidelia00balm).pdf/181

 He found that the sensation of freedom, which had seized him when he was skating out from the shore, abandoned him only temporarily after his return. He had cast off, with Alice, a burden of conscience. He wrote to his father: "Alice and I are no longer engaged. We will never marry each other." Also he wrote, but he did not send: "A girl has come to college who is of the type you would find more detrimental to me than Alice. For she is the most beautiful girl I have ever seen. I know almost nothing about her character except that she is pleasant, strong in physical endurance and keeps cheerful hour after hour under trying conditions. The truth is, I think little about her character and less about her religious faith. I believe, as a matter of fact, she has none, though she likes to go to church. I love her.

"Probably you wouldn't call it love. You'd say I desire her. All right. But I mean to marry her, if I possibly can."

Dave wrote, even for himself, no more than that, though he kept what he had written and was tempted to send it on after he received his father's reply. For his father assumed that the end of the betrothal of Alice and David had come as a result of sober realization of David's "duty." Ephraim Herrick protested his satisfaction and his conviction that it "followed the will of our Lord."

There came also, in the same envelope, a sheet written by his mother who prayed that her son had no heartache; and it was this which held Dave from a rejoinder to his father. Instead, Dave called upon that fund of accrued, but not yet earned, commissions