quieting. He thought: "Alice feels what I'm doing. She knows it's not the same. And it's not!"
It cast him into shame for himself and he realized that it ought to make him miserable. He wondered how it did not for, instead of being wretched, he felt an amazing recklessness which gave him pangs of exaltation surprising and strange to him. Also they frightened him; he warned himself, "If I give in to this, I don't know what I may do." He had never before understood impulses of utter irresponsibility.
The nearest he had come to them had been that night with Alice and he tried to believe, as she did, that everything was as before with them. Neither of them spoke of Fidelia Netley; and there was, in this, a certain confession of their fear of her; for everybody in the college was talking about her and it was queer not to mention her at all.
Then occurred his astonishing conduct of Friday morning.
He awoke early that morning, about five o'clock, he guessed; for the stars were clear and sharp above his window and the air which came in was dry, keen night air. It was very cold. The thermometer had shown zero when he went to bed; and now it seemed even colder.
Down in the basement, the freshman who took care of the furnace was shoveling coal. Dave could hear the scrape of the steel scoop plainly; probably he had been awakened by the shaking of the grate, but he might have stirred anyway from long habit of rising early in winter. He had tended furnaces to support himself when he first came to Northwestern; so these
