Page:Fidelia, (IA fidelia00balm).pdf/75

 this volume of her diary; for she closed this book and stepped to her trunk, which had been brought to her room after supper. Unlocking the trunk, she uncovered a set of twelve diary volumes which contained her self-record from the time she was ten years old. She touched the covers of several of the books but took out only one which was easily distinguished from the others by its scorched leather.

The sight and feel of this charred binding increased Fidelia's excitement, reminding her of two occasions when she had thrown it into a fire and then rescued it. She fingered the blackened edges for a moment before turning to the pages dated, in that period after she left Stanford University.

"Lakoon, Idaho," she read at the top of an entry; then she forgot everything as she read, breathing deeply, her own record of her own doings and passions at that time and place, preserved for herself as she would remember it.

Every time she took this book in her hands, she knew she ought to finish burning it; but every time she opened it, she knew why she had not destroyed it and why she never would. Nothing she could read elsewhere could compare with this; and when she said to herself that, if she destroyed the book, she would remember all, she found this was not so. How amazingly vivid the image and sensations restored by the written word!

So she always kept the book near her, trusting to the excellent lock of her trunk. She was quivering when, at last, she ceased to read; quivering when she