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IDELIA NETLEY, at the age of twenty-three, was going again to college as another girl, who was lonely and who had been badly treated, would go home; for as long as Fidelia could remember, a school of one sort or another had been her home.

Up to the year she was fifteen, there had been a house in White Falls, Iowa, which had been her place of residence, in a legal sense; at least, its street number always was recorded as her address on the register of the schools in which she had lived since she was seven. But Fidelia feared that house more than any other spot on earth; for it was the home of aunt Minna.

She was the sister of Fidelia's father and a widow with children of her own, older than Fidelia, and she frankly hated Fidelia for at least two outspoken reasons; one was because her brother had left his money, every penny of it, to his daughter in trust at the Drovers' Bank; the other was Fidelia's mother.

In a vague, emotional way, Fidelia retained some recollections of her father. Of course she had a picture of him and so she maintained an image of his appearance; but she also had memory of having