The artist looked at his watch.

The train was the Golden State Limited that had brought him from the far away East, a few months before.
Aaron King remembered how, from the platform of the observation car, he had looked up at the mountains from which he now looked down.

He remembered too, the woman into whose eyes he had, for the first time, looked that day.

Turning his face to the west, he could distinguish under the haze of the distance the dark squares of the orange groves of Fairlands.

Before three days had passed he would be in his studio home again.