red by your father's example, and wished to find a
gold mine."

"Men like you never do," she said, simply.

"Is that a compliment, Miss Mulrady?"

"I don't know. But I think that you think that it is."

He gave her the pleased look of one who had unexpectedly found a
sympathetic intelligence. "Do I? This is interesting. Let's sit
down." In their desultory rambling they had reached, quite
unconsciously, the large boulder at the roadside. Mamie hesitated a
moment, looked up and down the road, and then, with an already opulent
indifference to the damaging of her spotless skirt, sat herself upon
it, with her furled parasol held by her two little hands thrown over
her half-drawn-up knee. The young editor, half sitting, half leaning,
against the stone, began to draw figures in the sand with his cane.

"On the contrary, Miss Mulrady, I hope to make some money here. You are
leaving Rough-and-Ready because you are rich. We are coming to it
because we are poor."

"We?" echoed Mamie, lazily, looking up the road.

"Yes. My father and two sisters."

"I am sorry. I might have known them if I hadn't been going away." At
the same moment, it flashed across her mind that, if they were like the
man before her, they might prove disagreeably independent and critical.
"Is your father in business?" she asked.

He shook his head. After a pause, he said, punctuating his sentences
with the point of his stick in the soft dust, "He is paralyzed, and out
of his mind, Miss Mulrady. I came to California to seek him, as all
news of him ceased three years since; and I found him only two weeks
ago, alone, friendless--an unrecognized pauper in the county hospital."

"Two weeks ago? That was when I went to Sacramento."

"Very probably."

"It must have been very shocking to you?"

"It was."

"I should think you'd feel real bad?"

"I do, at times." He smiled, and laid his stick on the stone. "You now
see, Miss Mulrady, how necessary to me is this good fortune that you
don't think me worthy of. Meantime I must try to make a home for them
at Rough-and-Ready."

Miss Mulrady put down her knee and her parasol. "We mustn't stay here
much longer, you know."

"Why?"

"Why, the stage-coach comes by at about this time."

"And you think the passengers will observe us sitting here?"

"Of course they will."

"Miss Mulrady, I implore you to stay."

He was leaning over her with such apparent earnestness of voice and
gesture th