fore the cottage in which he was born and above which, when he was a baby, the Angel of Death had hovered, with the doctor helpless to send the angel away until the father and mother had prayed to God, promising God that their firstborn, if spared, would do his work.
"Silly!" said Dave to himself, to get himself out of this; and he turned and went on; but as he walked alone down the silent, deserted street, fright seized him for his defiance of Eternity.
He tried to shake it off by thinking of Alice and summoning to himself the sensation of her in his arms; but he could not. He failed to regain the sensation and, instead, he remembered that she, too, had been afraid not for herself but for him; and after he had declared to her his defiance of fear, she had doubted him.
He had left the train at a station which was slightly north of the Delta Alpha house; and so, as he turned south, he came first to Mrs. Fansler's.
"There's where that girl lives," he said to himself. "Fidelia Netley," he repeated her name; and he looked up at the big house which was all dark now except for a night-light aglow in the halls. He wondered where, in the house, she was; and he wondered this without becoming aware of any real significance in his wondering, although that was a strange thing for David Herrick. For he knew many of the girls living in that house but never before had wondered in which portion any of them roomed.
Likewise he failed to realize that it was when he
