Molly Make-Believe

ment of the pink-shrouded visitor. The amazement in fact never wavered for a second from Stanton's blush-red visage, nor the supreme serenity from the lady's whole at

visitor's attention focused suddenly on the cluttered table and she cried out with u

eatures right into the scared, pallid face of the shabby old clock and announced

around again the

re the fire and stretched out her overshoed toes to the shining edge of the fender. As far as any

even an indefinite speech to the girl until she had made at least one perfectly definite and reasonably illuminating sort of speech to him. Biting his

tor rose in a gloomy, discouraged kind of way, and climbing up again o

rceptible suggestion of a tremor. "It's twenty minutes of eight-now-and I've got to leave here exactly at e

e whole dark, ominous room as though the gray, sulky, smoldering hearth-fire itself had exploded into iridescent flame. Chasi

h finished laughing it w

nd worse than that I owed it-long before I even got it! And worst of all, I've got a chance now to go home to-morrow for all the rest of the winter. No, I don't mean that exactly. I mean I've found a chance to go up to Vermont and have all my expenses paid-just for reading aloud every day to a lady who isn't so awfully deaf. But you see I still owe you a week's subscription-and I can't refund you the money because I haven't got it. And it happens tha

witch of her lips at the edge of her masking pink veil resolve itself suddenly into a whimper of real pain. Yet so vivid were the lips, so blissfully

ce with incongruous pathos. "Indeed I know I'm not because-well because-the

walked the first two fingers of her right hand across the

ave spoken the words more deliciously. Even to the actual crunching of the toast in her little shining white teeth, s

ghter attested his full a

e plain, stark crazy if you gave them even one more pair of poor rubber boots than they'd paid for. But a woman! Well, you see my little business was a sort of a scheme to sell sympathy-perfectly good sympathy, you know-but to sell it to people who really needed it, instead of giving it away to people who didn't care anything about it at all. And you have to run that sort of business almost entirely with your heart-and you wouldn't feel decent at all, unless you deli

" quizzed Stanton

people." Then, "Did you like the idea of the 'Rheum

cried Stanton.

apology the girl straightened

etimes I turn up just at supper-time and jolly them along a bit with their gruels. Sometimes I don't get around till ten or eleven o'clock in the great boo-black dark. From two to three in the morning seems to be the cruelest, grayest, coldest time for the little girl in Cambridge.... And I play the banjo decently well, you know, and sing more or less-and tell stories, or read aloud; and I most always go dressed up in some sort of a fancy costume 'cause I can'

that the little, little girl was going to die-and was calling and calling for the 'Gray-Plush Squirrel Lady'. So I hired a big gray squirrel coat from a furrier whom I know, and I ripped up my muff and made me the very best sort of a hot, gray, smothery face that I could-and I went out to Cambridge and sat three hours on the footboard of a bed, cracking jokes-and nuts-to beguile a little child's death-pain. And somehow it broke my heart

breath, as though just the mere fancy thought of running awa

aking-up lovers-that I actually cherish the bill collector as the only real, genuine acquaintance whom I have in Boston. Certainly there's no slighte

anton, "why don't you let somebod

e now. We're reading Oriental Fairy stories together. Truly I think she'll be very glad indeed to release me from my contract when I offer her my coral beads instead, because they are dreadfully nice beads, my real, unpretended grandfather carved them for me himself..

ook-gorgeous!"

rk purple shadows. Great, heavy, jet-black curls caught back from her small piquant face by a blazing rhinestone fillet,-cheeks just a tiny bit over-tinted with rouge and excitement,-big, red-brown eyes packed full of high lights like a startled fawn's,-bold in the utter

equivalent? Would you?

n to smooth and twist her silken sash into place. Somewhere a

-gorgeous!" she s