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FIDELIA

walk, at the tips of her small, pretty shoes. He glanced at her hands. How often he had clasped them! She asked: "Where are you living?"

The way she said "you" included Fidelia with him. He told her: "Right down here at the hotel."

She turned enough to glance toward the hotel. "You're near," she said.

"Yes."

"You must be doing well, David," she continued, still gazing toward the hotel; then she looked at him and noticed his clothes.

"I am, Alice. The car's turned out a good one."

"I heard so."

He wanted to ask her how she had heard; but the fact that she, who had planned his business so intimately with him, now had to hear through a third person how it was going, shook them both.

"I suppose," she started and stopped and, after swallowing, she said, "I suppose you're able to start already paying back Mr. Fuller, though you didn't have to till January."

How his arrangements hung in her mind! It was not strange for they had been her arrangements too.

"We could pay off something now—I mean Snelgrove and I," he particularized his "we." He had meant Snelgrove and himself, not Fidel:a and himself; he never thought of Fidelia with him in the business although he realized that always, with Alice, he had said "we," for her and him, when making the plan. "But Mr. Fuller doesn't want us to lower our balance yet. He's well satisfied."