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274
FIDELIA

year yet who was getting along, Heaven knew how, without David's money. Fidelia thought of her warm, friendly gray eyes and her sweet smile and her very thin and very worn hands and she thought of David's money deposited for her but lying, untouched, in the bank. And Fidelia thought also of Lan, the plain, square, likable boy who was the first person she had met on coming to Northwestern; she had always liked Lan and at first he had liked her. But now, because of her, he had hurt David.

Of course the hurt, itself, would not have been so sharp but it flicked upon the raw of the hurt before.

When David came in, she lay without moving; and he did not disturb her. Long after he was in bed, and after he had ceased to shift about and turn, Fidelia lay awake.

A star was bright in the square of sky which she could see through the open window; it was near to the course of the moon and strange to the constellation in which it shone to-night. Fidelia knew therefore that it was a planet; she marked it well in her mind and the next day she inquired what planet it was and she learned, as she expected, that it was Saturn, again, the wandering star of misfortune which had ruled the sky on the night David and she were adrift on the floe.