“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.
Miss Mollie sat in the doorway of the Mountain House in the warm twilight and watched them as they went slowly forward arm in arm. They brought back the sentiment of youth, and she shared vicariously in its romance. Yet there was a heartache scarcely stilled in the realization that the imperceptible gradations of time had swept her away from the morning world in which youth dwells; that for her, beginning to be visible down the pathway of the years, were the silences—the solitudes that she must before long enter alone.
The twilight deepened. The last vestige of color faded from the sky. The white cap of Brown's Peak sank into the gloom, merged with the blue of the heavens and was lost to sight. There was a footfall on the path as a tall shadow detached itself from the night, and Mr. Brown, with his dog Duffer at his heels, paused on the step. Seeing a woman in the doorway of the lighted office, he removed his hat.
“Evening,” he said.
“Won't you step in?” asked Miss Mollie, slipping aside her chair which blocked the entrance. “I guess you're Mr. Brown Johnny was telling us about at supper?” she added.