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 in college, Allie. Wasn't there a secret that Roy Wheen knew and that our Stanford chapter was covering up? There was a girl visiting in Davenport, just across the river from Rock Island, who was in Stanford when Fidelia was. She was awfully eloquent about a man named Bolton—he wasn't in college but he was playing around ardently with her."

"With your friend, you mean?"

"You know I don't; with Fidelia. He was large and handsome with black hair and dark eyes. He was one of California's proud native sons—a second or third son of somebody who owned about half of a California county. They run to area out there. Well, Sam Bolton was one who went simply wild over Fidelia. He used to arise at midnight on the farm—or the ranch, whatever it was—and ride all night over the mountains to steam into Palo Alto to see her. Or if he was quite a ways off, when he got the feeling that he couldn't live except in her presence, he'd burn up the California highways at sixty or seventy miles an hour when everybody else was asleep. He was especially given to strenuous and spectacular stunts."

Myra halted.

"Well?" said Alice, breathing irregularly.

"Well, what?"

"What did he do? I mean, did she care for him? Was she engaged?"

"Oh, she was engaged to him all right."

"Then?" said Alice.

"That's it; then? Then Fidelia left college; that is, she didn't come back. And neither did he. The next thing we know, it's a year and a half later and