"GOING to chapel to-day?" David asked Alice, when they came out.
"No, thanks. I think I'll go right home."
He walked to the car line with her alone, except that other couples were a few steps ahead of them and still others were behind. They talked to each other as usual but each was conscious of an effort to do so. They waited, silently, for a car and when it stopped Dave held Alice back after others got aboard. "Wait for the next car," he begged.
"Why?" she asked but she stepped away with him.
"Alice, you're feeling bad about something."
"I'm not . . . I mean, if I am, so are you."
"I'm not," he denied.
The car had gone on, having taken everybody else from the corner.
"We're stupid standing here, David," she said; then, "Davey." Her eyes blurred.
He seized her arm. "Let's walk. After last night, we shouldn't ever have trouble."
"No, we shouldn't."
"What have I done, Alice?"
She did not answer.
"What have I done?" he repeated; then he appealed: "I wish I could talk to you. I wish we could be like last night again, Alice. But I've got to go down town. I've got to see Snelgrove about our business, dear."
He clasped her arm tight. "There's nothing the matter between you and me, Alice," he denied. "There can't be."
She looked up at him, her eyes ablur. "No; there can't be, Davey," she cried. "There can't be. . . . Here's another car."
He stopped it and helped her on to it, and he watched it away with a pang of his usual feeling. But when he was walking alone to the railroad station to take a train to Chicago, he wondered where Fidelia Netley was.
Fidelia just then was at chapel. She liked chapel for the verve of many people meeting and for the singing. She was accustomed to going to church and chapel for, besides being agreeable, it helped her with people. She knew scores of hymns by heart and she sang with a clear, vibrant soprano, and without having to look at the book which she held:
"He leadeth me, He leadeth me;
By his own hand, He leadeth me.
His faithful follower I would be;
For by his hand, He leadeth me."
She repeated the Lord's prayer aloud and with perfect rhythm in her words. She liked the formal prayers, for their beauty of rhythm, almost as much as she liked the hymns.
On her way out from chapel, she met several more girls and men; and several others hovered on the edges of the group without coming close.
She began to notice a boy of about twenty who first was on her right and then was on her left and now had moved again as though circling to have a look at her from every side. He was a serious person, wearing steel-rimmed spectacles; his ready-made gray suit and coat were of good enough material but they had not been pressed recently.
Evidently he was a careless, or at least an absent-minded boy, untidy in his studiousness.
Fidelia grew uneasy under his peculiarly persistent observation; she saw him once speak to Dorothy Hess and ask a question and then peer at her again. When he vanished, she had the feeling that he was watching her from behind.
She walked home with Dorothy and another girl from Mrs. Fansler's; and she waited until Dorothy and she were alone in the upper hall at the boardinghouse before she asked Dorothy:
"Who was that man with steel-rimmed glasses who spoke to you after chapel?"
"Why, that was Roy Wheen!" Dorothy said with evident surprise that Fidelia found any interest in him. "Why?"
Fidelia stiffened and waited a moment to be able to reply casually: "I wondered if I ought to know him."
"Why," said Dorothy, "he asked me your name and where you came from."
"What did you tell him?"
"Why, your name and that you were from Stanford."
"Yes," said Fidelia and quickly changed the subject, getting Dorothy to think of something else before she went into her room.
Fidelia closed her own door and held to the knob. "He was in Mondora then," she whispered to herself. "He saw me. But he's not sure of me."