He made great haste with the towel, then he stepped close to the window. His mop of black curls was raised toward the yellow head, there was a soft sound and Mr. Severance seemed greatly cheered and refreshed by something. “Mollie, you got the sweetest lips to kiss,—honest you have,” he said. The girl laughed shyly. “You always say that.” “You want I should aways tell you the truth, don't you?” he demanded, his arm about her shoulders. “Can't you say something different?” asked Mollie, puckering her brows and then dimpling at him. “What's the use of trying? You bet you I don't want to think no different,” and Johnny looked at her with adoring eyes, their faces very close together. Finally he released her. “Any news, Mollie?” he asked. “The gentleman that's bought the Pay Streak over at Alvarado was here for lunch. He come in a big touring-car with his wife and baby, and its nurse. They seemed awful nice people, Johnny.” “I wish I had his bank roll. They say he's a millionaire all right,” said Johnny. “Mollie!” a voice called from within, and Mollie said hastily as she turned away: “Supper's on the table; you can come in when you get ready.” M. Ferguson was another Mollie, the younger Mollie's aunt. Years before while Sunset was still a prosperous mining camp, she had come West to make her home with her brother and to take charge of his motherless child. The brother had died in that evil time when the bottom was dropping out of Sunset. She had given the best years of her life to her niece; singlehanded she had fought a long fight with adverse circumstances and had won a modest victory. Now one can not live an utterly self-sacrificing life to no purpose, so Miss Mollie had a certain sweet dignity that came of much goodness, and a soul at peace with itself. The Mountain House was a part of the niece's heritage. It was kept alive by chance tourists. Johnny was the regular, the star boarder, and frequently the only one, and at all times so much at home that he usually wiped the supper dishes. Mollie washed them. Johnny was the trusted man up at the Red Bird, the very right hand of a soulless corporation whose only symptoms of life were in its feet and even they were undeniably cold. He pulled down seventy dollars a month just as easy! With all this wealth pouring in upon him every thirty days, with money saved, too, and Mollie flitting in and out of those big bare rooms at the Mountain House, why, no wonder he was intent on matrimony! That night after the dishes had been duly washed and as duly dried in the intervals between sundry breathless moments when Johnny's black curls and Mollie's golden head were very close together, they strolled out upon what had once been Sunset's long main street, past the houses that still fronted it and up the trail toward the Red Bird.