Passengers on the Golden State Limited—­as perhaps you know—­do not go direct to Fairlands.  They change at Fairlands Junction.  The little city, itself, is set in the lap of the hills that form the southern side of the valley, some three miles from the main line.  It is as though this particular “Queen” withdrew from the great highway traveled by the vulgar herd—­in the proud aloofness of her superior clay, sufficient unto herself.  The soil out of which Fairlands is made is much richer, it is said, than the common dirt of her sister cities less than fifteen miles distant.  A difference of only a few feet in elevation seems, strangely, to give her a much more rarefied air.  Her proudest boast is that she has a larger number of millionaires in proportion to her population than any other city in the land.

It was these peculiar and well-known advantages of Fairlands that led the young man of my story to select it as the starting point of his worthy ambition.  And Fairlands is a good place for one so richly endowed with an inheritance that cannot be expressed in dollars to try his strength.  Given such a community, amid such surroundings, with a man like the young man of my story, and something may be depended upon to happen.

While the travelers from the East, bound for Fairlands, were waiting at the Junction for the local train that would take them through the orange groves to their journey’s end, the young man noticed the woman of the observation car platform with her two companions.  And now, as he paced to and fro, enjoying the exercise after the days of confinement in the Pullman, he observed them with stimulated interest—­they, too, were going to Fairlands.

The man of the party, though certainly not old in years, was frightfully aged by dissipation and disease.  The gross, sensual mouth with its loose-hanging lips; the blotched and clammy skin; the pale, watery eyes with their inflamed rims and flabby pouches; the sunken chest, skinny neck and limbs; and the thin rasping voice—­all cried aloud the shame of a misspent life.  It was as clearly evident that he was a man of wealth and, in the eyes of the world, of an enviable social rank.

As the young man passed and repassed them, where they stood under the big pepper tree that shades the depot, the man—­in his harsh, throaty whisper, between spasms of coughing—­was cursing the train service, the country, the weather; and, apparently, whatever else he could think of as being worthy or unworthy his impotent ill-temper.  The shadowy suggestion of womanhood—­glancing toward the young man—­was saying, with affected giggles, “O papa, don’t!  Oh isn’t it perfectly lovely!  O papa, don’t!  Do hush!  What will people think?” This last variation of his daughter’s plaint must have given the man some satisfaction, at least, for it furnished him another target for his pointless shafts; and he fairly outdid himself in politely damning whoever might presume to think anything at all of