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 then to see another girl take him from you! Once to have felt the kisses of love, the embrace of his arms, his warmth, his stir, his wish for you above all others in the world; to long for him and to feel his longing to mate with you, to give yourself and receive him in return; to form no plan, to know no hope or dream apart from him! Then to have it all torn from you, never to feel again his lips on yours, his arms about you but to know he is gone to another, giving all to her, leaving you unwanted and useless.

Her feeling of uselessness was something which she had not foreseen, when she lost David; it was something beyond her expected loneliness and hurt. It was a nullifying of her own nature which was to bear children; it was a forbidding of her very body to perform its natural purpose. It was almost incredible that Fidelia could have robbed her of so much.

If Alice had been able to foresee this, she never would have let David go so easily, she thought. It became amazing to her that she had not made more struggle. She did not know how she might have held him but she accused herself for not having done more, more. She thought of herself as having been unable to believe that Fidelia could so quickly destroy all that had grown between David and herself through three and a half years. Now Alice denied that Fidelia had destroyed it; certainly Fidelia had not destroyed it in Alice; and what lived in her must live, a little, in David, too; and if it lived, it must have power again to grow in him.

But suppose Fidelia bore David children! Alice hardly could let herself think of that; yet it had to