# Fidelia/Chapter 31

WOULD she live always in fear of Fidelia's return? Might it be that Fidelia was now nearing the city, suddenly to appear as she had on that night at college? Or might it be that Fidelia was further away than England? Might it not be, indeed, that Fidelia could never return?
The long silence, without a word from her or of her, suggested this sometimes. It was a year since that day, following Myra's wedding, when Fidelia had left David. A line to Mr. Jessup could clear up the question at once; and often Alice spurred her courage to suggest to David to write to White Falls but always her courage failed. David was trying to forget Fidelia and suppose a letter to Mr. Jessop should bring back Fidelia! So Alice clung to the happiness she had.
She knew she could not keep it as it was, even if she would; soon David and she must have more—or nothing. He was working very hard to pay off another installment of his debt and he succeeded in doing this on January first in spite of the fact that business fell off markedly in the last quarter of the year.
The dullness was due to a general condition on the row which reflected the feeling of the months in which the President of the United States made his last peace appeal to the Powers and received the reply that the ​Powers could not enter negotiations until they reached their Objectives.
"The agency is certainly not worth what it was," David said to Alice, when he reported to her that he had made his second payment to Mr. Fuller, "but I think I could get the last fifteen thousand I owe—or something close to it—if I sold out my interest."
"You mean you're thinking of selling out?" she asked.
"Shouldn't we?" he replied, speaking the "we" for her and him, which he had not said since they were in college. "This country's surely going into the war; and selling out is the only way for me to be ready."
"You ought to be ready," she said and her heart halted.
Barely a month after this day the President sent back Bernstorff to Berlin.
It was a Saturday, upon which this was announced, and David telephoned to Alice early in the afternoon and when he had told her the news, he said, "No one's going to buy a car to-day and I don't feel like selling, either. Do you mind if I come out early?"
Alice told him that she did not mind; and while she waited, she shut herself in her room with a letter from Myra, which had arrived a few days before. Myra was full of fear for Lan who was in Serbia and who had not been heard from in two months. Alice trembled as she held the letter and she declared to herself: "He's going away too; and it's your pride that's been keeping you from him. You're still hurt because he preferred her to you and you're afraid to have what ​you can for fear she'll take him from you again."
Alice opened the letter and a snapshot of Myra's baby boy slipped out. Alice recovered it and quivered. "You'll take him to-day or never," she threatened herself.
David was reckoning, as he drove out from his office, the exceedingly unsatisfactory sum of his achievement which consisted in the sale, to more or less willing customers, of a few hundred motorcars and in the expenditure of most of his profits in temporarily agreeable living with Fidelia at a hotel.
Now she was gone and their friends, of his extravagant days, meant so little to him that he had not seen one of them in months. He felt he had accomplished nothing since he had left college; he felt how very different might have been this day for him if he had been true to Alice. How different might have been this day for her, if he had stayed true! He deserved the bitterness of this reckoning, but she did not. His thought swept back through their years in college together and to the day when, trembling and incredulous that she could care for him, he asked her clumsily for the right to be always her friend and she had cried and kissed him.
David drove very fast in his haste to her.
He found her at the door when he arrived and the manner of his coming, and of her waiting, was like long ago. He flung off his coat and followed her into their little room overlooking the lake.
"You're lovely," he said as they stood and gazed at each other. His word recalled words spoken to her ​years before; he did not think at all of Fidelia. "You loyal, little Alice! What can I do to-day? Tell me what I can do?"
"Love me!"
"Love you! Oh, my God, I do!"
"Do you, David?"
"You mean—do I forget her? I don't! I told the truth that day. Often I think of her, when she was my wife. I suppose I always will. But I don't want her now; and that's as true as the other. Alice, I want you!"
"I want you, David!" She raised her hands against him when he moved; and he halted as she held him with her slender, gentle hands. "But I've always wanted you," she said.
"Yes," he replied and was silent.
"David, in my room, after you telephoned, I said that pride musn't make any difference to-day. You're going to war as Lan went. Nothing like pride should make any difference; but it does! David, you had me and you wanted her and you got her and kept her till she left you."
David said, "How can I deny that?"
"You can't but you can tell me another truth. Tell me, if it's the truth, David, but only if it's true! You went to her because there was lack in me; but you found lack in her, too, didn't you? Else, why did you telephone me that day your father bothered you? That day—that day, at least—she wasn't everything for you! You wanted me, though you had her; is that true?"
"Yes."
​"Then say to me, though you had her you wanted me! It's true!"
"Though I had her, I wanted you. Yes; that's true."
"I don't ask you to say anything else. If there was one time you wanted me, though you had her, there must have been others; but I don't ask you to say more of her. It's enough, David; that silly pride of mine is down. It's all right!"
"You mean I can—"
"Your arms, David . . . Davey, your lips. . . . Oh, again! . . ."
In the next room, upon the second day, they were married by his father before her family and Myra and Deborah and his brother Paul.
They chose for their wedding trip the mountains of North Carolina and the train on which they journeyed halted in Indianapolis on the night of the news of the British attack and capture of Grandcourt.
A window was raised in the compartment which Alice and David shared; and as she lay awake, she heard, outside the screen, voices of men who were passing beside the car. One said, "I bet the Canadians were in it. They're always in an attack; they're getting the casualties."
For an instant, the words brought to Alice an image of Bolton killed and Fidelia returning.
Alice moved her hand in the dark and touched her husband.