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                                FIDELITY

                                A NOVEL

                           BY SUSAN GLASPELL

      Author of "THE GLORY OF THE CONQUERED," "THE VISIONING," ETC.


BOSTON
SMALL, MAYNARD AND COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

_Copyright, 1915_
BY SMALL, MAYNARD AND COMPANY
INCORPORATED)

Printers
S. J. PARKHILL & CO., BOSTON U.S.A.


TO
LUCY HUFFAKER




FIDELITY




CHAPTER ONE


It was hard to get back into the easy current of everyday talk. Cora
Albright's question had too rudely pulled them out of it, disturbing the
quiet flow of inconsequential things. Even when they had recovered and
were safely flowing along on the fact that the new hotel was to cost two
hundred thousand dollars, after they had moved with apparent serenity to
lamentation over a neighbor who was sick in bed and without a cook, it
was as if they were making a display of the ease with which they could
move on those commonplace things, as if thus to deny the consciousness
of whirlpools near by.

So they seemed to Dr. Deane Franklin, who, secured by the shadow of the
porch vine, could smile to himself at the way he saw through them.
Though Deane Franklin's smile for seeing through people was not so much
a smile as a queer little twist of the left side of his face, a screwing
up of it that half shut one eye and pulled his mouth out of shape, the
same twist that used to make people call him a homely youngster. He was
thinking that Cora's question, or at any rate her manner in asking it,
would itself have told that she had lived away from Freeport for a
number of years. She did not know that they did not talk about Ruth
Holland any more, that certainly they did not speak of her in the tone
of everyday things.

And yet, looking at it in any but the Freeport way, it was the most
natural thing in the world that Cora should have asked what she did.
Mrs. Lawrence had asked if Mr. Holland--he was Ruth's father--was
getting any better, and then Cora had turned to him with the inquiry:
"Do you ever hear from Ruth?"

It was queer how it arrested them all. He saw Mrs. Lawrence's start and
her quick look over to her daughter--now Edith Lawrence Blair, the Edith
Lawrence who had been Ruth's dearest friend. It was Edith herself who
had most interested him. She had been leaning to the far side of her big
chair in order to escape the shaft of light from the porch lamp. But at
Cora's question she made a quick turn that brought her directly into the
light. It gave her startled face, so suddenly and sharply revealed, an
unmasked aspect as she turned from Cora to him. And when he quietly
answered: "Yes, I had a letter from Ruth this morning," her look of
amazement, of sudden feeling, seemed for the instant caught there in the
light. He got her quick look over to Amy--his bride, and then her
conscious leaning back from the disclosing shaft into the shadow.

He himself had become suddenly conscious of Amy. They had been in
California for their honeymoon, and had just returned to Freeport. Amy
was not a Freeport girl, and was new to his old crowd, which the visit
of Cora Albright was bringing together in various little reunions. She
had been sitting over at the far side of the group, talking with Will
Blair, Edith's husband. Now they too had stopped talking.

"She wanted to know about her father," he added.

No one said anything. That irritated him. It seemed that Edith or her
mother, now that Cora had opened it up, might make some little attempt
at the common decencies of such a situation, might ask if Ruth would
come home if her father died, speak of her as if she were a human being.

Cora did not appear to get from their silence that she was violating
Freeport custom. "Her mother died just about a year after Ruth--left,
didn't she?" she pursued.

"About that," he tersely answered.

"Died of a broken heart," murmured Mrs. Lawrence.

"She died of pneumonia," was his retort, a little sharp for a young man
to an older woman.

Her