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 and the warmth of the walk. "They all like you!" he declared. "They never saw anybody as beautiful as you before."

He and she were alone when they reached the picket fence. "Here's home," David said.

At this hour of a summer afternoon, the shadow of the steeple fell across the path to the house; and David stood in the shadow after he opened the gate.

The church was closed and quiet; the cottage was as quiet, although the door and windows stood open. No one was in sight.

David said: "Probably only mother and the girls are home. Probably they're busy in back." Ordinarily he would have called out, at coming home; but now he did not. He led Fidelia to the door. "We'll go in," he said.

The house within was quiet; a sweet odor, that of strawberries cooking, came from the kitchen. "Mother's putting up preserves," David whispered to Fidelia. He did not want to announce them just yet; he was watching Fidelia as she glanced about his home.

Plain, cheap curtains, but very clean, hung at the windows; the carpet on the living-room floor was nearly threadbare. The furniture was a plain, oak table, dented but polished, a horse-hair covered sofa and a severe rocking-chair and several plain, "straight" chairs of differing ages and design. The wall paper was clean by dint of repeated rubbings with bread crumbs and at the cost of much of the gray and brown pattern which originally had decorated it. Upon the furniture, upon the curtains, upon the carpet, every-