it was to tell him lightly where she had been that afternoon and David had no idea of how she dwelt on the incident.
She recorded it carefully in her diary as soon as he left her alone the next morning.
An inevitable effect of such recording, which Fidelia did not appreciate, was to give more weight to some circumstances than they perhaps merited. It was her nature to exaggerate her feelings and she wrote, in part: "I came in on David to-night in the dark; and it gave me a start! I knew right away he had had some experience. He had; he'd seen Alice for the first time since we've been married. Of course he'd feel badly and be sorry for her. I am. But he wasn't just sorry for her; he was thinking about her; he wanted to think about her there by himself; that's why he was sitting alone in the dark.
"There's things between them that stay with him and I don't make him forget. I feel it a lot of times. She's got a hold on him that he can't help and maybe I can't. . . . His father's got another hold on him. Sometimes I'm much more afraid of that, though David and I are man and wife now and that means forever with father Herrick. But if he ever found out about Lakoon, and it turns out I'm wrong, I guess he'd not stop at anything with me."
In several entries in her diary of following days, she made similar reference to the possibility of her being "wrong" about an event which she described no more definitely than "Lakoon." It was in her mind, troubling her again and again. One morning she wrote: "I am sure about it; I've every reason to feel
