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IDELIA disappeared into the women's room, half an hour before the train was due at Itanaca, and when she emerged she was fresh and radiant without a sign of four hours' hot travel. David arose as she rejoined him and she asked: "Do I look all right now?"

"You're the most beautiful girl in the world!" he whispered to her and he was sure it was so.

The heat and excitement brightened her large eyes and heightened the clear color of her lovely skin. David was excited.

The town, which the train was entering, differed in no important aspect from other towns passed during the afternoon. The drab, dusty station was a replica of others; behind it lay a wide, rutted, sunbaked road. Harder's general store showed a sun-blistered side to arriving passengers; Eldrige's feed store faced it and there was old Jake Cullen shoeing a horse in the door of his blacksmith shop. Half a dozen identical cars, all identically dusty, clustered before the Ford Garage. The dry, dust-powdered elms of July drooped in the parched parkway before "The Itanaca House"; an opposite clump somewhat shaded the west front of the new, white painted picture theater and of Lekkin's billiard hall next it.

In David's mind, as he gazed from the car, there