No; she had no right to fear Fidelia in England.
As it proved, David never went across. He was very well liked and he worked hard and gained a recommendation which won him a captaincy and assignment, with other officers of unusual energy and ability, to take special instruction at the School of Fire, at Fort Sill, which was in the southwestern part of Oklahoma.
This fort was near the town of Lawton; so Alice went there and found furnished quarters in an Oklahoma boarding-house where, through winter rain and summer drought and dust and heat, while David drilled for the great artillery attack which was to be made in the spring of 1919, Alice watched the war out.
Other wives at the boarding-house went home, at their appointed times in that year, and telegrams arrived telling of the birth of a boy or a girl; some of the mothers returned with their babies; and a few had their babies born at Lawton; but Alice was without child and she returned alone with David to the bungalow with the wide, rough stone chimney and the room, beside their own bedroom, which she had said would be their baby's.
She cried by herself in the little house; she cried not solely from her disappointment. With the war over, with its duties for her and its excitements ended, and she without a child, what was she to do?
She felt that David and she were approaching the condition which surprised them at the end of their term in college. Again he had been doing double work at school and had given to his hard task his entire in-
