glistened motionless in the sun.  The train went slowly and stopped often, for there seemed to be one long succession of gardens and villages.  After the empty, wind-driven plains they had come through, those vast cold expanses without a house or living creature in sight, what a laughing plenty, what a gracious fruitfulness, was here.  And when they went back to their compartment it too was full of summer smells,—­the smell of fruit, and roses, and honey.

For the first time since the war began and with it their wanderings, the twins felt completely happy.  It was as though the loveliness wrapped them round and they stretched themselves in it and forgot.  No fear of the future, no doubt of it at all, they thought, gazing out of the window, the soft air patting their faces, could possibly bother them here.  They never, for instance, could be cold here, or go hungry.  A great confidence in life invaded them.  The Delloggs, sun-soaked and orange-fed for years in this place, couldn’t but be gentle too, and kind and calm.  Impossible not to get a sort of refulgence oneself, they thought, living here, and absorb it and give it out again.  They pictured the Delloggs as bland pillars of light coming forward effulgently to greet them, and bathing them in the beams of their hospitality.  And the feeling of responsibility and anxiety that had never left Anna-Rose since she last saw Aunt Alice dropped off her in this place, and she felt that sun and oranges, backed by L200 in the bank, would be difficult things for misfortune to get at.

As for Mr. Twist, he was even more entranced than the twins as he gazed out of the window, for being older he had had time to see more ugly things, had got more used to them and to taking them as principally making up life.  He stared at what he saw, and thought with wonder of his mother’s drawing-room at Clark, of its gloomy, velvet-upholstered discomforts, of the cold mist creeping round the house, and of that last scene in it, with her black figure in the middle of it, tall and thin and shaking with bitterness.  He had certainly been in that drawing-room and heard her so terribly denouncing him, but it was very difficult to believe; it seemed so exactly like a nightmare, and this the happy normal waking up in the morning.

They all three were in the highest spirits when they got out at Los Angeles and drove across to the Southern Pacific station—­the name alone made their hearts leap—­to catch the afternoon train on to where the Delloggs lived, and their spirits were the kind one can imagine in released souls on their first arriving in paradise,—­high, yet subdued; happy, but reverential; a sort of rollicking awe.  They were subdued, in fact, by beauty.  And the journey along the edge of the Pacific to Acapulco, where the Delloggs lived, encouraged and developed this kind of spirits, for the sun began to set, and, as the train ran for miles close to the water with nothing but a strip of sand between it and the surf,