Page:Fidelia, (IA fidelia00balm).pdf/370

 "I'm not good to you. You're the good one. You stuck to me throughout all that deadly training and never a complaint from you for boarding-school food or heat or the dust or the dullness of it all. A smile for me every time and such dearness, Alice!"

Alice and he went to her father's home for dinner on a Sunday. It was February and the lake was frozen as it had been seven years before; and up and down the shore rose white hummocks and hillocks of ice making miniature mountains and valleys like those which Fidelia had visited on the morning she rose to see the sunrise and he had followed her and they had become Titans together on the brink of Creation and they had played in the caves of the coast of Iceland fifty thousand years ago.

Beyond lay the floe and it drifted slowly as it had on that night when Fidelia and he left the world together, through the Seventh Gate, and on the Throne of Saturn sate.

He saw the hotel and he thought of the gay suite where breakfast was brought to Fidelia and him and she sat in the sun with her hair over her shoulders.

When they arrived at the house, they went up to her old room. In the next room, which now was called his, he found a letter which had been forwarded from the hotel where Fidelia and he had lived and at which he had registered Mr. Sothron's address for mail which might arrive when he was in service.

The postmark was White Falls, Iowa, and on the flap was engraved The Drovers' Bank. He tore it open and read: