"My child, what would the world be without you?"
"You stayed up all night—for me?" Fidelia said, after Mrs. Fansler told her.
Mrs. Fansler did not blame Fidelia at all; having to blame some one, she found fault with Dave whereupon Fidelia praised him and yet managed not to offend Mrs. Fansler.
Dave wondered how she did it; and he decided it was not so much by words, or by tact, as by just being herself and being again in Mrs. Fansler's clasp. For any one who once had had her, the world would surely be drab without her, Dave thought.
He walked slowly up the plank to the dock in a manner which caused the city press reporter to comment that David Herrick was visibly weakened by the night's experience.
Dave was weakened. He had slept upon the tug but not soundly, as Fidelia had; and he had gone through an experience far more tremendous than the exhaustion from exposure. The throb of the engines, the warmth of the bunk in which he had lain, the smell of lubricating oil and coffee and the gray daylight had begun the business of returning him from under that inverted bowl of stars and the throne of Saturn, where one might dream and plan and suppose, and had brought him back to the realities of black river docks, with grimy warehouses wherein were telephones. He must use one of these to call the Sothron's number and speak to Alice. What, what in the world was he to say to her?
"It's over," he felt, as he stepped ashore; it was the end of his ecstatic sensation of "I'm away" with which
