Page:Fidelia, (IA fidelia00balm).pdf/251

 and black, high shoes. In her presence, he kept his coat buttoned, no matter how hot the day; and Fidelia had never seen him except when he was clean-shaven, but his beard was so heavy that it darkened his skin.

Knowing that he and his wife and six children had lived together in a small, crowded house, Fidelia never could have understood how he had maintained the separateness from them which all his children felt, unless she had visited Itanaca and seen him at home and, in particular, unless she had learned about his room in the tower under the steeple.

She had seen, at one of her visits, that there was a screen in the bedroom which he shared with his wife and she had learned that his wife dressed behind this screen, when he was in the room. As his wife and he occupied the same bed, Fidelia could not follow the direction of his ideas of modesty at all.

He said to her, gesturing to the door with the hand in which he held his black, felt hat: "Go in."

"How is mother Herrick?" Fidelia inquired, as she obeyed.

"She is as usual, recently," he replied.

"No better?" Fidelia asked and she flushed with feeling for the thin mother with warm, gray eyes and sweet smile who always kissed her and liked to call her "daughter." Mother Herrick was not as strong as usual this summer, Deborah had written to David.

Ephraim Herrick, having already answered Fidelia's question, ignored its repetition. He stepped into the room and felt assailed by a personal offense from the gay luxuriousness of this suite of his son. Such living held no proper place in his scheme of things.