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 settle over the bare, black October fields, he realized that he had boarded the ordinary day-coach and that thought of the parlor car, in which he had traveled to and from Itanaca with Fidelia, had never entered his mind. In contrast to his feeling when he started from Chicago, he was physically tired; he was without eagerness and appetite. When he thought of Fidelia, he thought of having to tell her the terrible news he bore; it so filled him, it so completely explained what he had done that he never reckoned what she might be believing in her almost complete lack of information about him. He forgot that when he left Fidelia, both of them had been feeling that he was, in a way, returning for a while to Alice; he forgot how Fidelia had urged him to stay longer where Alice was, if he wanted to, and he did not attach the two extra days of his absence to the day he had spent with Alice. Yet, as he reckoned the total time and realized that it was by far his longest separation from Fidelia, since their marriage, he wished he had written her once, at least; but he had not because each day he had expected to return to her that night.

"She'll be hurt," he realized. "But it won't last with her." The train began running into rain. The clear weather of the western edge of the state was changed to a downpour as the train approached the lake; squalls of water washed the window at David's elbow and the lightning crashed in great streaks from the sky.

David had not telegraphed to Fidelia the hour of his return for he did not want to meet her first in the railroad station and when he arrived in the middle of