Copper Creek had been waiting in suppressed excitement to see whom Cheyenne Harry would accompany--Molly Lafond or the newcomer--and lo! he had come alone. Then, before the astonishment had subsided, the outer door opened again and Molly entered, looking very pale and sweet and serious. She walked directly by the bar into the dance hall, where she seated herself near the door and looked calmly about her. She was dressed entirely in white. Cheyenne Harry was leaning over the bar talking attentively, so that he was perhaps the only person in the room who did not see her come in. A dozen men at once surrounded her and began to chat. She answered them good-humoredly enough, but indifferently. The door once more flew open and Bismarck Anne, standing on the sill, cried out in her clear, high voice, "Well, boys!" She paused a moment. Cheyenne Harry, turning at the sound of her voice, remembered how, about a year ago, Molly Lafond had stood there in just that attitude. But he felt a great difference. Cheyenne Harry had for some time, as we have said, been growing a little tired of his affair with Molly. The mental ingredients of satiety were all present, but he had as yet received no conscious notice of their existence. He imagined himself as much fascinated as ever. If something lately had seemed to lack, he had laid it to circumstances and not at all to the state of his relations with the girl. But for all that, the satiety had been real. He only needed to be told of it to realize it himself very plainly. Bismarck Anne had told him. He saw now absolutely no attraction for himself in Molly Lafond, and that without attempting to deny her intrinsic attraction for others. He simply did not care for her any more. It seemed perhaps like a sudden revulsion, but it was not so really; it had been inevitable from the very first, and from the very first it had been slowly maturing. Not even the results were sudden: only Cheyenne Harry's knowledge of them. He had always felt his relations with Molly Lafond as more or less restrictive, because the good is always so. He had dimly caught the truth that, without a deep moral incentive, restriction is always irksome; that although pure love is the most ideal condition in the world, its simulation is the most wearisome after the novelty has worn off; and all the rest of the long psychological train of emotion and reasoning common to the trifler. But now for the first time he knew it. He knew it because, standing in the doorway, looking at him with bold black eyes, was the exact opposite of all this, and he recognized a mighty relief. Bismarck Anne knew enough to dress all in black. She had the taste to appreciate the effect of one red flower in her hair as her only ornament. She had the sense to wear her dress cut neither too low above nor too high below. And so she was exceedingly handsome as she stood there, the devil of excitement in her eyes.