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 not look about to her and keep the wheels in the ruts of the snow but he understood she was making her gentle protest.

"What is it?" he asked.

"It brought you to me, Davey."

"What did?"

"Your not having money. Oh, I know it's been horrible; I don't like to think of it having been horrible for you. But Davey—Davey, how can I feel so about it when it brought me you?"

"It wasn't that, Alice," he denied, almost impatiently. "We'd have got together anyway."

"Yes; we must have; we must have. But—" she squeezed his strong, tense forearm with all the power of her slender fingers and let him go.

He swung the car about a corner and headed it east directly into the wind. They had come to the southern limit of Evanston where the road, which they had been following, turns to the very shore of the lake and clings to the edge of the water for the dark distance south past Calvary Cemetery to the beginning of the great north shore residence blocks of Chicago.

It was a wild, lonely stretch of road that night with no other car in sight, with the roaring violence of the lake beyond the black void on the left and on the right, the dark, silent cemetery, snow-covered and storm-swept, and with gray, still monuments suddenly appearing on the side as the headlights of the motorcar diffused a glow in the sweep of the whistling snow.

"What does your father say about me?" Alice asked.

Dave jerked his head but made no reply.