"But I can't do that!" she would object to some proposition of his. "I'd like to. I think it would be great fun. But you know very well I've promised Dave Kelly to go up with him this afternoon to look at his claim." "That doesn't matter," replied Harry cavalierly. "But it _does_ matter," she persisted. "I've promised." "Oh, shake him. Tell him some yarn. _Do_ something. It isn't every day I get an afternoon off this way." Though why he did not, it would be difficult to say. "I know, but I've _promised_." "Oh, very well," said Cheyenne Harry, with cold finality, and began to whistle as if the question were quite disposed of. This did not suit Molly at all. "There isn't anything I can do, is there?" she asked after a moment. "You know best." "Oh, dear, I don't _want_ you to feel like that." "Why shouldn't I feel like that?" cried Harry in sudden heat. "Here I look forward to a whole afternoon with you, and I'm thrown down just because of a kid. I suppose you'd rather trot around with him than with me. All right. Go ahead." He began to whistle again. He never said what the result would be if she did "go ahead," and this very mysterious indifference had its effect. Molly, genuinely distressed, knit her brows, not knowing what to do. "Now look here!" commanded Harry, after a minute, with great decision; "you go find that Kid, and send him up to Kelly's claim to say you can't come this afternoon. You can fix it to suit yourself next time you see him," and then he would himself find the Kid and despatch him. Molly always acquiesced, but with inward misgivings. She must now do her best to conceal from Dave Kelly the real state of affairs; he must not by any chance see her with Harry; he must not hear from outside sources of her afternoon's excursion with that individual. An element of the clandestine had crept into it. The idea oppressed her, for, in spite of her store of spirits and her independent temper, she was not of a combative nature when she felt herself at all in the wrong. The necessity saddened her, brought to her that guilty feeling against which she so sullenly rebelled. She was uneasy during all the afternoon, and yet she was conscious of an added delicious thrill in her relations with Harry--a thrill that first tingled pleasantly through all her veins, then struck her heart numb with vague culpability. In due course, she came to transfer the emotion from the circumstances to the man. She experienced the same thrill, the same numb culpability, at the sight of his figure approaching her on the street.