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Sisters

by Kathleen Thompson Norris · English · Gutenberg #4947 · 539,290 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Sisters

Author: Kathleen Thompson Norris


        
Release date: January 1, 2004 [eBook #4947]
                Most recently updated: May 21, 2013

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4947

Credits: Produced by Charles Franks and the Online Distributed
        Proofreading Team. HTML version by Al Haines.


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SISTERS ***




Produced by Charles Franks and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team. HTML version by Al Haines.










THE WORKS OF KATHLEEN NORRIS

SISTERS

VOLUME X




TO

FRANCES ROSE BENET

    Dear mother of my mother's child, to you
    The tribute brings not praise from me alone,
    Still clings some grace of hers to what I do,
    And the gift comes in her name, as my own.




CHAPTER I


Cherry Strickland came in the door of the Strickland house, and shut it
behind her, and stood so, with her hands behind her on the knob, and
her slender body leaning forward, and her breath rising and falling on
deep, ecstatic breaths. It was May in California, she was just
eighteen, and for twenty-one minutes she had been engaged to be married.

She hardly knew why, after that last farewell to Martin, she had run so
swiftly up the path, and why she had flashed into the house, and closed
the door with such noiseless haste. There was nothing to run for! But
it was as if she feared that the joy within her might escape into the
moonlight night that was so perfumed with lilacs and the scent of wet
woods. In this new happiness of hers a fear was already mingled, a
sweet fear, truly, and a delicious fear, but she had never feared
anything before in her life. She was afraid now that it was all too
wonderful to be true, that she would awaken in the morning to find it
only a dream, that she would somehow fall short of Martin's
ideal--somehow fail him--somehow turn all this magic of moonshine and
kisses into ashes and heartbreak.

She was a miser with her treasure, already; she wanted to fly with it,
and to hide it away, and to test its reality in secret, alone. She had
come running in from the wonderland down by the gate, just for this,
just to prove to herself that it would not vanish in the
commonplaceness of the shabby hall, would not disappear before the
everyday contact of everyday things.

There was moonlight here, too, falling in clear squares on the stairway
landing, white and mysterious and bewitching, but on the other side of
the hall was wholesome, cheerful lamplight creeping in a warm streak
under the sitting-room door.

Dad was in the sitting room, with the girls. The doctor's house was
full of girls. Anne, his niece, was twenty-four; Alix, Cherry's sister,
three years younger--how staid and unmarried and undesired they seemed
to-night to panting and glowing and glorified eighteen! Anne, with
Alix's erratic help, kept house for her uncle, and was supposed to keep
a sharp eye on Cherry, too. But she hadn't been sharp enough to keep
Martin Lloyd from asking her to marry him, exulted Cherry, as she stood
breathless and laughing in the dark hallway.

Cherry had never had any other home than this shabby brown bungalow,
and she knew every inch of the hall, even without light to see it. She
knew the faded rugs, and the study door that swallowed up her father
every day, and the table where Alix had put a great bowl of buttercups,
and the glass-paned door at the back through which the doctor's girls
had looked out at many a frosty morning, and red sunset, and
sun-steeped summer afternoon. But even the old hall had seemed
transformed to-night, lighted with a beauty quite new, scented with an
immortal sweetness.

Hong came out of the dining room; the varnished buttercups twinkled in
a sudden flood of light. He had come to put a folded tablecloth into
the old wardrobe that did for a sideboard, under the stairs. Cherry,
descending to earth, smiled at him, and crossed the hall to the
sitting-room door.

An older woman might have gone upstairs, to dream alone of her new joy,
but Cherry thought that it would be "fun" to join the family, and "act
as if nothing had happened!" She was only a child, after all.

Consciously or unconsciously, they had all tried to keep her a child,
these three who looked up to smile at her as she came in. One of them,
rosy, gray-headed, magnificent at sixty, was her father, whose
favourite she knew she was. He held out his hand to her without closing
the book that was in the other hand, and drew her to the wide arm of
his chair, where she settled herself with her soft young body resting
against him, her slim ankles crossed, and her cheek dropped against his
thick silver hair.

Alix was reading, and dreamily scratching her ankle as she read; she
was a tall, awkward girl, younger far at twenty-one than Cherry was at
eighteen, pretty in a gipsyish way, untidy as to hair, with round black
eyes, high, thin cheek-bones marked with scarlet, and a wide, humorous
mouth that was somehow droll in its expression even when she was angry
or serious. She was rarely angry; she was unexacting, good-humoured,
preferring animals to people, and unconventional in speech and manner.
Her father and Anne sometimes discussed her anxiously; they confessed
that they were rather fearful for Alix. For Cherry, neither one had
ever had a disquieting thought.

Anne, smiling demurely over her white sewing, was a small,
prettily-made little woman, with silky hair trimly braided, and a
rather pale, small face with charming and regular features. She was not
considered exactly pretty; perhaps the contrast with Cherry's unusual
beauty was rather hard on both the older girls; but she was so
perfectly capable in her little groove, so busy, contented, and
necessary in the doctor's household, that it was rather a habit with
all their friends to praise Anne. Anne had "admirers," too, Cherry
reflected, looking at her to-night, but neither she nor Alix had ever
been engaged--engaged--engaged!

"Aren't you home early?" said Doctor Strickland, rubbing his cheek
against his youngest daughter's cheek in sleepy content. He was never
quite happy unless all three girls were in his sight, but for this girl
he had always felt an especial protecting fondness. It seemed only
yesterday that Cherry, a rosy-cheeked sturdy little girl in a checked
gingham apron, had been trotting off to school; to him it was yesterday
that she had been a squarely-built baby, digging in the garden paths,
and sniffing at the border pinks. He had followed her exquisite
childhood with more than a father's usual devotion, perhaps because she
really had been an exceptionally endearing child, perhaps because she
had been given him, a tiny crying thing in a blanket, to fill the great
gap her mother's going had left in his heart. He had sympathized with
her microscopic cut fingers, he had smiled into her glowing, damp
little face when she stuttered to him long tales of bad doggies and big
'ticks; he had brought her "jacks" and paper-dolls and hair ribbons; he
loved the diminutive femininity of the creature; she was all a woman,
even at three. Alix he proudly called his "boy"; Alix used hair ribbons
to tie up her dogs, and demanded hip boots and an air rifle and got
them, too, and used them, but when he took Alix in his arms she was apt
to bump his nose violently with her hard young head, to break his
glasses, or at best to wriggle herself free. Little Cherry, however,
was 'fraid of dogs, she told her father, and of guns, and she would
curl up in his arms for happy half-hours, with her gold curls sprayed
against his shoulder, and her soft little hand tucked into his own.

"Mr. Lloyd had to take the nine o'clock train," Cherry answered her
father dreamily, "and he and Peter walked home with me!" She did not
add that Peter had left them at his own turning, a quarter of a mile
away.

"I thought he wasn't going to be at Mrs. North's for dinner," Anne
observed quietly, in the silence. She had been informally asked to the
Norths' for dinner that evening herself, and had declined for no other
reason than that attractive Martin Lloyd was presumably not to be there.

"He wasn't," Cherry said. "He thought he had to go to town at six. I
just stopped in to give them Dad's message, and they teased me to stay.
You knew where I was, didn't you--Dad?" she murmured.

"Mrs. North telephoned about six, and said you were there, but she
didn't say that Mr. Lloyd was," Anne said, with a faint hint of
discontent in her tone.

Alix fixed her bright, mischievous eyes upon the two, and suspended her
reading for a moment. Alix's attitude toward the opposite sex was one
of calm contempt, outwardly. But she had made rather an exception of
Martin Lloyd, and had recently had a conversation with him on the
subject of sensible, platonic friendships between men and women. At the
mention of his name she looked up, remembering this talk with a little
thrill.

His name had thrilled Anne, too, although she betrayed no sign of it as
she sat quietly matching silks. In fact, all three of the girls were
quite ready to fall in love with young Lloyd, if two of them had not
actually done so.

He was a newcomer in the little town, a tall, presentable fellow, ready
with laughter, ready with words, and always more than ready for
flirtation. He admitted that he liked to flirt; his gay daring had
quite carried Anne's citadel, and had even gained Alix's grudging
response. Cherry had not been at home when Martin first appeared in
Mill Valley, and the older girls had written her, visiting friends in
Napa, that she must come and meet the new man.

Martin was a mining engineer: he had been employed in a Nevada mine,
but was visiting his cousin in the valley now before going to a new
position in June. In its informal fashion, Mill Valley had entertained
him; he had tramped to the big forest five miles away with the
Stricklands, and there had been a picnic to the mountain-top, everybody
making the hard climb except Peter Joyce, who was a trifle lame, and
perhaps a little lazy as well, and who usually rode an old horse, with
the lunch in saddle-bags at each side. Alix formulated her theories of
platonic friendships on these walks; Anne dreamed a foolish, happy
dream. Girls did marry, men did take wives to themselves, dreamed Anne;
it would be unspeakably sweet, but it would be no miracle!

And Anne, always busy and happy and helpful, was more so than ever,
unpacking the delicious lunch, capably arranging for everybody's
comfort and pleasure, looking up with innocent surprise when Martin
bent over her as she fussed and rearranged baskets.

"I thought YOU were gathering wood!"

"Did you, indeed? Let the other fellows do that. I shan't be here
forever, and I'm privileged."

"Would you like me to give you something else to do?"

"No, ma'am, I'm quite happy, thank you!"

Not much in the words to remember, truly, but the tone and the look
went straight to Anne's close-guarded heart. Every time she looked up
at the mountain, rearing its dark crest above the little valley, they
had come back to her.

That was all several weeks ago, now. It was just after that mountain
picnic that Cherry had come home; on a Sunday, as it chanced, that was
her eighteenth birthday, and on which Martin and his aunt were coming
to dinner. Alix had marked the occasion by wearing a loose velvet gown
in which she fancied herself; Anne had conscientiously decorated the
table, had seen to it that there was ice-cream, and chicken, and all
the accessories that make a Sunday dinner in the country a national
institution. Cherry had done nothing helpful.

On the contrary, she had disgraced herself and infuriated Hong by
deciding to make fudge the last minute. Hong had finally relegated her
to the laundry, and it was from this limbo that Martin, laughing
joyously, extricated her, when, sticky and repentant, she had called
for help. It was Martin who untied the checked brown apron,
disentangling from the strings the silky gold tendrils that were
blowing over Cherry's white neck, and Martin who opened the door for
her sugary fingers, and Martin who watched the flying little figure out
of sight with a prolonged "Whew-w-w!" of utter astonishment. The child
was a beauty.

But if she was beautiful when flushed and cross and sticky, there was
no word for her when she presently came demurely downstairs, her
exquisite little red mouth still pouting, her bright head still
drooping sulkily, but her wonderful eyes glinting mischief, and the
dark, tumbled apron replaced by thin white ruffles that began at
Cherry's shoulders and ended above her ankles. Soft, firm round chin,
straight little nose, blue eyes ringed with babyish shadows; Martin
found them all adorable, as was every inch of the slender, beautifully
made little body, the brown warm hand, the clear, childish forehead,
the square little foot in a shining slipper.

Her eighteenth birthday! He learned that she had just put up her hair,
indeed, after dinner, her father made her tumble it down in a golden
mop again. "Can't lose my last girl, you know," he said to Mrs. North,
Martin's aunt, seriously. Martin had been shown her birthday gifts:
books and a silver belt buckle and a gold pen and stationery and
handkerchiefs. A day or two later she had had another gift; had opened
the tiny Shreve box with a sudden hammering at her heart, with a
presage of delight. She had found a silver-topped candy jar, and the
card of Mr. John Martin Lloyd, and under the name, in tiny letters, the
words "O fudge!" The girls laughed over this nonsense appreciatively,
but there was more than laughter in Cherry's heart.

From that moment the world was changed. Her father, her sister, her
cousin had second place, now. Cherry had put out her innocent little
hand, and had opened the gate, and had passed through it into the
world. That hour was the beginning, and it had led her surely,
steadily, to the other hour to-night when she had been kissed, and had
kissed in return.

Nobody dreamed it, she told herself with innocent exultation, looking
at Alix, sunk into her chair ungracefully, and at Anne, peacefully
sewing. They thought of her as a child--she, who was engaged to be
married!

"So--we walk home with young men?" mused the doctor, smiling. "Look
here, girls, this little Miss Muffet will be cutting you both out with
that young man, if you're not careful!"

Alix, deep in her story, did not hear him, but Anne smiled faintly, and
faintly frowned as she shook her head. She considered Cherry
sufficiently precocious without Uncle Lee's ill-considered tolerance.
Anne had often told him that Cherry was the "pink-and-white type" that
would attract "boys" soon enough without any encouragement from him.
But he persisted in regarding her as nothing more than a captivating
baby!

He would have had them always children, this tender, simple, innocent
Doctor Strickland. He was in many ways a child himself. He had never
made money in his profession; he and his wife and the two tiny girls
had had a hard enough struggle sometimes. Anne and her own father had
joined the family eight years ago, in the same year that the Strickland
Patent Fire Extinguisher, over which the doctor had been puttering for
years, had been sold. It did not sell, as his neighbours believed, for
a million dollars, but for perhaps one tenth of that sum. It was
enough, and more than enough, whatever it was. After Anne's father died
it meant that the doctor could live on in the brown house under the
redwoods, with his girls, reading, fussing with a new invention,
walking, consulting with Anne, laughing at Alix, and spoiling his
youngest-born.

The house was shingled, low, framed in wide porches, smelling within
and without of the sweet woods about it. Here the Stricklands weathered
the cold, damp winters, when the trees dripped and the creeks swelled,
and here they watched the first emerald of spring breaking through the
loam of a thousand autumns; here they hunted for iris and wild lilac in
April, and hung Japanese lanterns through the long, warm summers. It
was a perfect life for the old man; it was only lately that he begun
uneasily to suspect that they would some day want something more, that
they would some day tire of empty forest and blowing mountain ridge,
and go away from the shadow of Mt. Tamalpais, and into the world.

Anne, now--was she beginning to fancy this young Lloyd? Doctor
Strickland was surprised with the fervour with which he repudiated the
thought. Anne had been admired, she must go to her own home some day.
But her uncle hoped that it would be a neighbouring home; this young
engineer, who had drifted already into a dozen different and distant
places, was not the man for staid little Anne. He was twenty-eight
years old, but it was not the discrepancy in years that mattered. The
doctor had himself been twelve years older than his wife. No, it was
something less tangible--

"What did you want to see Mr. Lloyd about to-morrow, Dad?" Cherry
interrupted his thoughts to ask.

"The rose vine!" her father reminded her.

"You'll never get that back on the roof!" Alix looked up to assure him
discouragingly. "I told you, when you were pruning it," she added
vivaciously, "that you were cutting too deep. No--you knew it all! Now
the first wind brings it down all over the place, and you get exactly
what you deserve!"

Her tone was less harsh than her words; indeed, it was the tone he
loved from her, that of a devoted but long-suffering mother. She came
to Cherry's hassock, and dropped on it, and rested her untidy head
against his knee.

"Anne aided and abetted me!" said the doctor meekly.

"To the extent of handing you your shears!" Anne said promptly.

"No, but really you know, Dad, you were a pig-headed little creature to
do that!" Alix said musically. "You might just as well cut it down at
the roots and plant another double banksia."

"I rather thought that Lloyd might have some idea of a tackle--or a
derrick or something--" submitted her father vaguely.

"Well, if anybody can--" Anne conceded, laughing. "What did he say
about coming over, Cherry?"

But Cherry had not been listening, and the conversation was reviewed
for her benefit. She remarked, between two rending yawns, that Mr.
Lloyd was coming over to-morrow at ten o'clock, and Peter, too--

"Peter won't be much good!" Alix commented. Cherry looked at her
reproachfully.

"You're awfully mean to Peter, lately!" she protested. Her father gave
her a shrewd look, with his good-night kiss, and immediately afterward
both the younger girls dragged their way up to bed.

Alix and Cherry shared a bare, woody-smelling room tucked away under
brown eaves. The walls were of raw pine, the latticed windows, in
bungalow fashion, opened into the fragrant darkness of the night. The
beds were really bunks, and above her bunk each girl had an extra
berth, for occasional guests. There was scant prettiness in the room,
and yet it was full of purity and charm. The girls sat upon their beds
while they were undressing, and plunged upon their knees on the bare
pine floor and rested their elbows upon the faded patchwork quilts
while they said their prayers. Mill Valley was so healthful a little
mountain village that among her two thousand residents there was only
one doctor, the old man who sat by the fire downstairs, and he had
formally retired from general practice. The girls, like all their
neighbours, were hardy, bred to cold baths, long walks, simple hours,
and simple food. In the soft Western climate they left their bedroom
windows open the year round; they liked to wake to winter damp and fog,
and go downstairs with blue finger-tips and chattering teeth, to warm
themselves with breakfast and the fire.

So Alix said nothing when Cherry went to the window to-night, and knelt
at it, looking out into the redwoods, and breathing the piney air. In
the silence of the little room the girls could hear a swollen creek
rushing; rich, loamy odours drifted in from the forest that had been
soaked with long April rains. Cherry saw a streak of light under the
door of Hong's cabin, a hundred yards away; there was no moon, it was
blackness unbroken under the trees. The season was late, but the girls
felt with a rush of delight that summer was with them at last; the air
was soft and warm, and there was a general sense of being freed from
the winter's wetness and heaviness.

Alix rolled herself in a gray army blanket, and was asleep in some
sixty seconds. But Cherry felt that she was floating in seas of new joy
and utter delight, and that she would never be sleepy again.

Downstairs Anne and the doctor sat staidly on, the man dreaming with a
knotted forehead, the girl sewing. Presently she ran a needle through
her fine white work with seven tiny stitches, folded it, and put her
thimble into a case that hung from her orderly workbag with a long
ribbon.

"Wait a minute, Anne," said the doctor, as she straightened herself to
rise. "This young Lloyd, now--what do YOU think of him?"

She widened demure blue eyes.

"Should you be sorry if I--liked him, Uncle Lee?" she smiled.

The old man rumpled his silver hair restlessly.

"No-o," he said, a little ruefully. "I suppose it'll be some man some
day, my dear. I've been thinking--even little Cherry seems to be
growing up!"

Anne, who modelled her deportment somewhat upon the conduct of Esther
in "Bleak House," came to the hassock at his knee, and sat there,
looking up at him with bright affection and respect.

"Cherry's only a child," she assured him, "and Alix will not be ready
to give her heart to any man for years to come! But I'm twenty-four,
Uncle. And sometimes I feel ready to--to try my own wings!"

He smiled at her absently; he was thinking of her mother, an
articulate, academic, resolute woman, of whom he had never been fond.

"That's the way the wind blows, eh?" he asked kindly.

Anne widened her pretty eyes.

"Well--you see how much he's here! You see the flowers and books and
notes. I'm not the sort of girl to wear my heart on my sleeve," Anne,
who was fond of small conservational tags, assured him merrily. "But
there must be some fire where there's so much smoke!" she ended.

"You're not sure, my dear?" he asked, after some thought.

"Oh, no!" she answered. "It's just a fancy that persists in coming and
going. You know, Uncle Lee," Anne pursued, confidentially, "I've always
had rather a high ideal of marriage. I've always said that the man I
would marry must be a big man--oh, I don't mean only physically! I mean
morally, mentally--a man among men!"

"And you think young Lloyd--answers that description, eh?"

"I think he does, Uncle Lee," she answered seriously. And immediately
afterward she got to her feet, saying brightly, "Well! we mustn't take
this too gravely--yet. It was only that I wanted to be open and
above-board with you, Uncle, from the beginning. That's the only honest
way."

"That's wise and right!" her uncle answered, in the kindly, absent tone
he had used to them as children, a tone he was apt to use to Anne when
she was in her highest mood, and one she rather resented.

"Cherry, now--" he asked, detaining her for a moment. "She--you don't
think that perhaps Peter admires her?"

"PETER!" Anne echoed amazedly, and stood thinking.

Peter was more than thirty years old, thin, scholarly, something of a
solitary, the sweet, dreamy, affectionate neighbour who had shared the
girls' lives for the past ten years. Cherry had bullied Peter since her
babyhood, ruined his piano with sticky fingers, trampled his rose-beds,
coaxed him into asking her father to let her sit up for dinner. For
some reason she could not, or would not, define, Anne liked the idea of
Cherry and Peter falling in love--

"Somehow one doesn't think of Peter as marrying any one--" she said
slowly, still trying to grasp the thought. "He's so--self-sufficient,"
she added, shaking her head. "You--you WOULDN'T like that, Uncle?"

"Peter is a dear fellow," the doctor mused. "But Cherry--why, she's
barely eighteen! He--" The old man hesitated, began again: "I suppose
there's no reason why Peter shouldn't kiss her, in a--brotherly sort of
way?" he submitted doubtfully.

"Did he kiss her?" Anne exclaimed.

"I don't know that he did," Cherry's father said hastily.

"But what made you think he did?" the girl persisted.

"Just a fancy," he assured her. "Just an old father's fear that she is
growing up too fast!"

"Because we all, and you especially, spoil her," Anne reminded him,
smiling. "Peter," she added thoughtfully, "has kissed us all, now and
then!" She stooped for a dutiful good-night kiss, and was gone. And as
she went, lightly and swiftly across the hall, up the stairway with her
shoulders erect, and methodically and prettily moved about her brushing
and folding and disrobing, she saw herself engaged to be married, saw
herself veiled and mystical in white, on her Uncle's arm, heard the old
neighbours and friends saying that little Anne Strickland had gone to
her own home, and had won the love of a fine man.

Downstairs, the doctor sat on, thinking, and his face was grave. He was
thinking of little Cherry's goodnight kiss, half an hour ago. She had
rested against his arm, and he had held her there, but what had been
the thoughts behind the blue eyes so near his own? Perhaps Anne was
right--perhaps Anne was right. But he realized with a great rush of
fear that some man had kissed Cherry to-night, had held her against a
tobacco-scented coat, and that the girl was a woman, and an awakened
woman at that. Cherry--kissed a man! Her father's heart winced away
from the thought.

Young Lloyd and Peter had walked home with her. But if Anne was right
in her maidenly suspicions of Lloyd's intentions, then it must have
been Peter who surprised little Cherry with a sudden embrace. Lloyd had
been hurrying for a train, too; the case looked clear for Peter.

And as he came to his conclusions, a certain relief crept into the old
man's heart. Peter was an odd fellow; he was ten years too old for the
child. But Peter was a lover of books and gardens and woods and music,
after all, and Peter's father and this old man musing by the fire had
been "Lee" and "Paul" to each other since boyhood. Peter might give
Cherry a kiss as innocently as a brother; in any case, Peter would wait
for her, would be all consideration and tenderness when he did win her.

"But I think perhaps she might go down to the San Jose school for half
a term," her father reflected. "Six months there did wonders for Alix.
No use precipitating things--the next few years are pretty important
for all the girls. We mustn't let her fancy that the first man who
turns her head with compliments is the right partner for life! Alix,
now--somehow she wasn't like Cherry, at eighteen."

He smiled at a sudden memory of Alix, who was chicken-farming at that
age, and generally unpleasantly redolent of incubators, chopped feed,
and mire. He seemed to remember Alix shouting that if Peter Joyce was
going to LIVE in their house, she would move somewhere else! Cherry was
different.

Cherry, he reflected fearfully, was as pretty as her mother had been at
eighteen, with the same rounded chin and apricot cheeks, and the same
shadowed innocent blue eyes with a film of corn-coloured hair blown
across them. She had the strange, the indefinable quality that without
words, almost without glances, draws youth toward youth, draws
admiration and passion, draws life and all its pain. Her father for the
first time to-night formulated in his heart the thought that she might
be happily married--

Married--nonsense! Why, what did she know of life, of submission and
courage and sacrifice? At the first strain, at the first real test, she
would want to run home to her Daddy again, to "stop playing"--! It
would be years, many years, before the snowy frills, and the pale gold
head, and the firm, brown little hand would be ready for that!

Not many hours after he went slowly up to bed morning began to creep
into the little valley. The redwoods turned gray, and then dark green,
the fog stirred, and a first shaft of bright sunlight struck across a
shoulder of the hills, and pierced the shadows about the brown
bungalow. Alix, at her early bath, heard quail calling, and looked out
to see the last of the fog vanishing at eight o'clock, and to get a wet
rush of fragrance from the Persian lilac, blooming this year for the
first time. At half-past eight she came out into the garden, to find
her father somewhat ruefully studying the tumbled ruins of the yellow
banksia rose. The garden was still wet, but warming fast; she picked a
plume of dark and perfumed heliotrope, and began to fasten it in his
coat lapel while she kissed him.

"We'll never get that back on the roof, my dear boy," Alix said
maternally.

Her father pursed his lips, shook his head doubtfully. The rose, a
short, week ago, had been spreading fan-like branches well toward the
ridge-pole, a story and a half above their heads. But the great wind of
yestereve that had ended the spring and brought in the summer had
dragged it from its place and flung it, a jumble of emerald leaves and
sweet clusters of creamy blossoms, across the path and the steps of the
porch. Alix looked up at the outward curve of the reversed branches,
bent almost to the splitting point in the unfamiliar direction, and
whistled. She tentatively tugged at a loose spray, and stood biting her
thumb.

"Why it should have kept its place for fifteen years and then suddenly
flopped, is a mystery to me!" she observed resentfully.

"Well, the truth is," her father confessed, "you were quite right last
night. When I pruned it, a week ago, I may have undermined it."

"You never will listen to reason!" his daughter remarked absently, her
attention distracted by the setter puppy who came clumsily gambolling
toward her. "Hello, old Bumpydoodles!" she added, with rich affection,
kissing the dog's silky head, and burying both hands in his feathered
collar. "Hello, old Buck!"

"Alexandra, for heaven's sake stop handling that brute!" said Peter
Joyce disgustedly, coming up the path. "I dare say you've not had your
breakfast, either. Go wash your hands! 'Morning, Doctor!"

Father and daughter turned to smile upon him, a tall, lean man, with a
young face and a finely groomed head, and with touches of premature
silver at his temples. He was very much at home here, had been their
closest friend for many years.

He was a bachelor, just entering his thirties, a fastidious, critical,
exacting man by reputation, but showing his best side to the
Stricklands. They had a vague idea that he was rich, according to their
modest standard, but he apparently had no extravagant tastes, and lived
as quietly, or more quietly, than they did. He had a brown cabin, up on
the mountain, where two or three Portuguese boys and an old, fat
Chinese cook managed his affairs, and he sometimes spoke of friends at
the club, or brought two or three men home with him for a visit. But
for the most part he liked solitude, books, music, dogs, and his
fireside. The old doctor's one social enjoyment was in visiting Peter,
and the younger man went to no other place so steadily as he came to
the old house under the redwoods.

The girls accepted him unquestioningly, sometimes resenting his frank
criticism, sometimes grateful for the entertaining he delighted to do
for them, but most often ignoring him, as if he had been an uncle whose
place and standing in the domestic circle was unquestioned, but who did
not really enter into their young plans and lives. He was whimsically,
good-naturedly disapproving of Alexandra, and he frankly did not like
Anne, but he had always been especially indulgent to Cherry, and had
taken the subject of Cherry's schooling and development very seriously.
And Cherry treated him, in return, as if she had been his demure and
mischievous and affectionate daughter.

"'Morning, Peter!" said Doctor Strickland now, smiling at him. "Have
you had yours?"

"My house," said Mr. Joyce fastidiously, "is a well-managed place."

"Of course," Alix said, panting from her welcome to the dog, and
laughing at the newcomer without resentment, "of course it is, for the
President Emeritus of the Maiden Ladies' Guild is running it!"

"Don't be insulting," Peter answered, in the same mood. "Say," he
added, pursing his lips to whistle, as he looked at the rose tree, "did
Tuesday's wind do that?"

"Tuesday's wind and Dad," Alix answered. "Will it go back, Peter?"

"I--I don't know!" he mused, walking slowly about the wreck. "If we had
a lever down here, and some fellow on the roof with a rope, maybe."

"Mr. Lloyd is coming over!" Alix announced. Peter nodded absently, but
the mention of Martin Lloyd reminded him that they had all dined at his
house on the very evening when the mysterious gale had commenced, and
with interest he asked:

"Cherry catch cold coming home Tuesday night?"

"No; she squeezed in between Dad and me, and was as warm as toast!"
Alix answered casually. "How'd you like Mr. Lloyd?" she added.

"Nice fellow!" Peter answered. Alix grinned. She had before this
accused Peter of violent partisanship with his own sex. He criticized
women severely; the Strickland girls had often been angry and resentful
at his comments upon the insincerity, extravagance, and ignorance of
their own sex, but with Peter, all men were worthy of respect, until
otherwise proved.

"He's awfully nice," Alix agreed.

"Who is he?" Peter asked curiously. "Where are his people and all that?"

"His people live in Portland," the girl answered. "He's a mining
engineer, and he's waiting now to be called to El Nido; he's to be at a
mine there. He's lots of fun--when you know him, really!"

"Talking of the new Prince Charming, of course," Anne said, joining
them, and linking an arm in her Uncle's and in Alix's arm. "Don't bring
that puppy in, Alix, please! Breakfast, Uncle Lee. Come and have
another cup of coffee, Peter!"

"Prince Charming, eh?" Peter echoed thoughtfully, as they all turned
toward a delicious drift of the odour of bacon and coffee, and crossed
the porch to the dining room. "I was going down for the mail, but now
I'll have to stay and see this rose matter through! Thanks, Anne, but
I'll watch you."

"Afraid of getting fatter?" Alix speculated, shaking out her napkin.
"You ARE fatter," she added, with a calm conviction.

"Do you always say the thing that will give the most offence?" Peter
asked, annoyed. "Where's Cherry?" he added, glancing about.

Cherry answered the question herself by trailing in in a Japanese
wrapper, and beginning to drink her coffee with bare, slender arms
resting on the table. Nobody protested, the adored youngest was usually
given her way. Alix's indifference to the niceties of her toilet had
been seriously combated, years ago, but Cherry was so young, and so
pretty in any dress or undress, that it was impossible to regard her
little lapses with any gravity. Moreover, the family realized perfectly
that Alix would have clipped her thick hair, and taken to bloomers or
knickerbockers outright, at the slightest encouragement, and would
gladly have breakfasted in a wrapper, or in her petticoats, or while
about the woods with her dogs, whereas nobody could know Cherry and not
know that every weakness of which the feminine heart is capable, for
frills and toilet waters, creams and laces, was dormant under the
childish negligence.

"I heard you all laughing, under the window and it--woke--me--up!"
Cherry said dreamily.

"It seems to me," Anne, who had been eying her uneasily, said lightly,
"that someone I know is getting pretty old to come downstairs in that
rig when strangers are here!"

"It seems to me this is just as decent as lots of things--bathing
suits, for instance!" Cherry returned instantly, gathering the robe
about her, and giving Anne a resentful glance over her blue cup.

"Peter, are you a stranger?" Alix said. "If Peter's a stranger," she
added animatedly, "what is an intimate friend? Peter walks through this
house at all hours; you can't wash your hair or do a little ironing
without having Peter under your feet; he borrows money from me; he
bullies Hong about wasting butter--"

"Also you borrow money from me, my child, don't forget that," Peter
interrupted serenely, peeling an apple. "I don't come to see YOU, Alix."

"I have a rope somewhere--" the doctor ruminated. "Where did I put that
long rope--what did I have it for, in the first place--"

"You had it to guy the apple tree," Alix reminded him. "Don't you
remember you got a regular ship's cable to tie that tree, and it never
worked? The tree that died after all--"

"Ah, yes!" said her father, his attentive face brightening. "Ah, yes!
Now WHERE is that rope?" But even as Alix observed that she had seen it
somewhere, and advanced a tentative guess as to the cellar, his eyes
fell upon Cherry, and went from Cherry's absorbed face--for she was
dreaming over her breakfast--to Peter, and he wondered if Peter HAD
kissed her.

"Come on, let's get at it!" Alix exclaimed with relish. She loved a
struggle of any description, had prepared for this one with sleeves
rolled to the elbows, and had put on heavy shoes and her briefest
skirt. "Come on, Sweetums," she added, to the dog, who had somehow
wormed his way into the dining room, and was beating the floor with an
obsequious tail. She caught his forepaws, and he whipped his beautiful
tail between his legs, and looked about with agonized eyes while she
dragged him through a clumsy dance. "He's the darlingest pup we ever
had!" Alix stated to Cherry, who was departing for the upper regions
and a complete costume.

"He needs a bath," Anne observed coldly, and Peter's abrupt shout of
laughter made Alix flush angrily.

"Bring your cigarette out here, Peter," the old doctor said, crossing
the garden to look in the abandoned greenhouse for his rope. "We're in
no hurry," he said. "We may as well wait until Lloyd comes along; the
fellow's arms are like flails. You---" the old man opened a reluctant
door, peered into a glassed space filled with muddy shelves and empty
flower-pots and spiderwebs. "It's not here," he stated. Then he began
again, "You brought Cherry home last night?" he asked.

"As a matter of fact, I didn't," Peter answered, in his quick, precise
tones. "I came with Lloyd and Cherry as far as the bridge, then I cut
up the hill. Why?" he added sharply. "What's up?"

"Nothing's up," Doctor Strickland said slowly. "But I think that Lloyd
admires--or is beginning to admire--her," he said.

"Who--Cherry!" Peter exclaimed, with distaste and incredulity in his
tone.

"You don't think so?" the doctor, looking at him wistfully, asked
eagerly.

"Why, certainly not!" Peter said quickly. "Certainly not," he added,
frowning, with his eyes narrowed, and his look fixed upon the vista of
woodland.

"I had a fancy that he might have been putting notions into her head,"
her father said, anxious to be reassured.

"But--great Scott!" Peter said, his face very red, "she's much younger
than Anne and Alix--"

"It doesn't always go by that," the doctor suggested.

"No, I know it doesn't," Peter answered in his quick, annoyed fashion.

"I should be sorry," Cherry's father admitted.

"Sorry!" Peter echoed impatiently. "But it's quite out of the question,
of course! It's quite out of the question. You mustn't--we mustn't--let
ourselves get scared about the first man that looks at her. She--she
wouldn't consider him for an instant," he suddenly decided in great
satisfaction. "You mustn't forget that she has something to do with it!
Very fastidious, Cherry. She's not like other girls!"

"That's true--that's true!" Doctor Strickland agreed, in great relief.
They turned back toward the garden, in time to meet Alix and several
dogs streaming across the clearing. Over the girl's shoulder was coiled
the great rope; she leaped various logs and small bushes as she came,
and the dogs barked madly and leaped with her. Breathless, she stumbled
and fell into her father's arms, and both men had the same thought, one
that made them smile upon her tomboyishness indulgently: "If this is
twenty-one--eighteen is three long years younger and less responsible!"




CHAPTER II


Immediately they gathered by the fallen rose vine, all talking and
disputing at once. Alix and the dogs added only noise to the confusion;
the men debated, measured, and doubted; Anne, busy with household
duties, came and went smilingly. About them stretched the forest,
wrapped in the summer morning stillness that is really compounded of a
thousand happy sounds. There was no fog now; warm spokes of sunshine
fell brightly into the dim, glowing heart of the woods; bees and birds
murmured on short journeys; aromatic sweetness drifted on the air.

They had known a thousand such mornings, the doctor and his girls,
still, exquisite, happy, dedicated to some absurd undertaking. They had
built chicken pens, they had dammed or cleared the creek, they had
felled bay-trees, and lopped the lower branches of the redwoods, they
had built roaring bonfires, or painted the porch floor, and many times
they had roasted chops or potatoes at the brick oven, and feasted
royally in the open forest.

A light rope was tied; an experimental tug broke it like a string,
tumbling Alix violently in a sitting position, and precipitating her
father into a loamy bed. Anne, who was bargaining with a Chinese fruit
vendor frankly interested in their undertaking, had called that she
would help them in a second, when behind Alix, who was still sitting on
the ground, another voice offered help.

A young man had come into the doctor's garden; work was stopped for a
few minutes while they welcomed Martin Lloyd.

He was tall and fair, broad, but with not an ounce of extra weight,
with brown eyes always laughing, and a ready friendliness always in
evidence. He was dressed becomingly to-day, in a brown army shirt open
at the throat, and shabby golf trousers that met his thick woollen
stockings at the knee. Anne's heart gave a throb of approval as she
studied him; Alix flushed furiously, scowled a certain boyish approval;
Cherry had not come down.

"Can you help us?" The doctor echoed his question doubtfully. "I don't
know that it can be done!" he admitted.

"This shameless old man has just confessed that he gouged the heart out
of the poor tree a week ago," Alix said, getting to her feet. "That's
the first use he put his birthday knife to! And Anne stood here and
abetted him, as far as I can find out!"

"How you garble things, Alix!" Anne said, giving her hand to Martin. "I
came out here to find my uncle busily pruning and chopping the dead
underwood away, but I had no more to do with it than you had!"

"What's that you're eating--an apricot?" Martin said to Anne, in his
laughing way. "I was going to say that if it was a peach, you are a
cannibal!"

"Oh, help!" Alix ejaculated, with a look of elaborate scorn.

"No, but where were you last night?" Martin added in a lower tone when
he and Anne could speak unnoticed. The happy colour flooded her face.

"I have to take care of my family SOMETIMES!" she reminded him
demurely. "Wasn't Cherry a good substitute?"

"Cherry's adorable!" he agreed heartily.

"Isn't she sweet?" Anne asked enthusiastically. "She's only a little
girl, really, but she's a little girl who is going to have a lot of
attention some day!" she added, in her most matronly manner.

Martin did not answer, but turning briskly toward the doctor, he
devoted himself to the business in hand. Peter had climbed on an
inverted barrel, to inspect and advise. Alix dashed upstairs for nails
and hammer; the doctor whittled pegs; Martin measured the comparative
strength of ropes and branches with a judicial eye and hand. Anne
flitted about, suggesting, commenting, her pretty little head tipped to
one side.

They were all deep in the first united tug, each person placed
carefully by the doctor, and guys for the rope driven at intervals
decided by Martin, when there was an interruption for Cherry's arrival
on the scene. With characteristic coquetry she did not approach, as the
others had, by means of the front porch and the garden path, but crept
from the study window into a veritable tunnel of green bloom, and came
crawling down it, as sweet and fragrant, as lovely and as fresh, as the
roses themselves. She wore a scant pink gingham that had been a dozen
times to the tub, and was faded and small; it might have been a regal
mantle and diadem without any further enhancing her extraordinary
beauty. Her bright head was hidden by a blue sunbonnet, assumed, she
explained later, because the thorns tangled her hair; but as, laughing
and smothered with roses, she crept into view, the sunbonnet slipped
back, and the lovely, flushed little face, with tendrils of gold
straying across the white forehead, and mischief gleaming in the blue,
blue eyes was framed only in loosened pale gold hair.

Years afterward Alix remembered her so, as Martin Lloyd helped her to
spring free of the branches, and she stood laughing at their surprise
and still clinging to his hand. "The day we raised the rose tree" had a
place of its own in Alix's memory, as a time of carefree fun and
content, a time of perfume and sunshine--perhaps the last time of its
kind that any one of them was to know.

Cherry looked at Martin daringly as she joined the labourers; her whole
being was thrilling to the excitement of his glance; she was hardly
conscious of what she was doing or saying. Under her father's direction
she tied ropes, presently was placed with her arms clasped tightly
about a great sheaf of vines, ready for the united tug. Martin came
close to her, in the general confusion.

"How's my little sweetheart this morning?"

Cherry looked up, her throat contracted, she looked down again, unable
to speak. She had been waiting for his first word; now that it had come
it seemed so far richer and sweeter than her wildest dream.

"How can I see you a minute?" Martin murmured, snapping his big knife
shut.

"I have to walk down for the mail--" stammered Cherry, conscious only
of Martin and herself.

Both Peter and her father were watching her with an uneasiness and
suspicion that had sprung into being full-blown. Both men were asking
themselves what they knew of this strange young man who was suddenly a
part of their intimate little world.

He was simply a man; not unusual in any apparent way. He was ready with
his words, fairly good-looking, clean and muscular, his evident lack of
polish in languages and letters atoned for by his quick wit, and by a
certain boyish artlessness and ingenuousness. He represented himself as
about to receive an excellent salary at the mine at El Nido, two
thousand a year, but also admitted cheerfully that he was always
"broke." He had distinguished himself at college, but had left it after
only two years, upon being offered a promising position. There was
nothing especially to admire in him, nothing especially to blame; under
other circumstances Peter and the doctor might have pronounced him as
one of the least interesting of human specimens. The beauty of
childhood and adolescence were gone, the ripeness given by years and
suffering was wanting; Martin Lloyd was just, as he himself laughingly
remarked, "one of the fellers."

Peter had secretly criticized him because he used the words "'phone"
and "photo" and "'Frisco," but in justice he had to admit to himself
that there was no particular significance to the criticism. He also, in
his secret heart, had a vague, dissatisfied feeling that Lloyd was a
man who held women, as a class, rather in disrespect, and had probably
had his experiences with them, but there was no way of expressing, much
less governing, his conduct toward Martin by so purely speculative a
prejudice. The young man had dined at his house a few nights ago, had
shown an admiration, if not an appreciation, for music, had talked with
sufficient intelligence about political matters, mining, and--what
else? photography, and pullman cars, and the latest wreck off
Bolinas--just the random conversation that was apt to trail through a
country dinner. He had told a Chinese joke well, and essayed an Irish
joke not so successfully. Peter, somewhat appalled, in the sunny
garden, struggling with the banksia, decided that this was not much to
know of a person who might have the audacity to fall in love with an
exquisite and innocent Cherry. After all, she would not be a little
girl forever, some man would want to take that little corn-coloured
head and that delicious little pink-clad person away with him some day,
to be his wife--

And suddenly Peter was torn by a stab of pure pain, and he stood
puzzled and sick, in the garden bed, wondering what was happening to
him.

"Listen--want a drink?" Alix asked, coming out with a tin dipper that
spilled a glittering sheet of water down on the thirsty nasturtiums.
"Rest a few minutes, Peter. Dad wanted a pole, and Mr. Lloyd has gone
up into the woods to cut one."

"And where's Cherry?" Peter asked, drinking deep.

"She went along--just up in the woods here!" Alix answered. "Dad had to
answer the telephone, but they're going to yell if they need help!
WELL!" and Alix, panting, sat down on a log, "are we going to do it?"

"We ought to go up and help Lloyd," Peter decreed. "Which way did he
go?"

"I don't know, darling!" Alix answered, leaning back, crossing her
ankles, and yawning. "But they'll be back before you could get there.
They've been gone five minutes!"

Only five minutes, but they were enough to take Cherry and her lover
out of sight of the house, enough to have him put his arm about her,
and to have her raise her lips confidently, and yet shyly, again to
his. They kissed each other deeply, again and again. The girl was a
little confused and even a little uneasy as he continued the tight grip
on his arm about her, and her upward look found his eyes close to her
own.

Their talk was incoherent. Cherry was still playing, coquetting and
smiling, her words few, and Martin, having her so near, could only
repeat the endearing phrases that attempted to express to her his love
and fervour.

"You darling! Do you know how I love you? You darling--you little
exquisite beauty! Do you love me--do you love me?" Martin murmured, and
Cherry answered breathlessly:

"You know I do--but you know I do!"

Presently he selected the sapling redwood, and brought it down with two
blows of his axe. The girl seated herself beside him, helped him strip
the trunk, their hands constantly touching, the man once or twice
delaying her for one more snatched and laughing kiss.

"But, Martin, you've been engaged before?" Cherry asked.

"Never--on my honour! But yes, I was once, too, years ago. I want to
tell you about that--"

He told her, her grave face bent over the redwood boughs she was
tearing. She nodded, flushed, paled. He had met this girl at his
mother's, do you see? And she was a cute little thing, don't you know?
Her name was Dorothy King, and when he went back to college she had
promised to write, do you see? But she hadn't written for weeks, and
then she had written to say that she was engaged to another man, a man
named--named--he had forgotten the name. But she had married him all
right----

And Cherry looked up, laughing almost reproachfully. How could he ever
forget her married name! Cherry said that she suspected that Martin
hadn't really cared, and he said no, but he had wanted to tell her
about it all the same, because knowing her had made him want really to
be honest--and to be good--

Tears stood in his eyes, and she forgave him his admiration for Dorothy
King, and said that she knew he was good. And Martin said that he was
going to make her the happiest wife a man ever had.

Dragging the stripped tree, they ran down the sharp hill to the house
just as Anne came out to announce luncheon. Peter was wandering off in
the woods nearby, but came at Alix's shrill yell of summons, and looked
relieved when he saw Cherry and Martin not even talking to each other.
They had been gone only ten minutes.

Anne, who did not like Peter, had decided not to ask him to stay, but
Peter had calmly taken his usual place, and had annoyed Anne with his
familiar questioning of Hong as to the amount of butter needed in
batter bread. It was a happy meal for everyone, and after it they had
attacked the rose bush again, with aching muscles now, and in the first
real summer heat. It was three o'clock before, with a great crackling,
and the scream of a twisted branch, and a general panting and heaving
on the part of the workers, at last the feathery mass had risen a
foot--two feet--into the air, had stood tottering like a wall of bloom,
and finally, with a downward rush, had settled to its old place on the
roof. Hong was pressed into service now, and with Martin, was on the
roof, grappling with a rope, shouting directions. A shower of tiny
blossoms and torn leaves covered the steps of the office-porch, the
garden beds were trampled deep, the seven labourers breathless and
exhausted. But the rose vine was in place! Alix shouted congratulations
to Martin as he busily roped and tied the recaptured masses in their
old position. Anne had vanished for sandwiches; Peter was being
scientifically bandaged by the doctor. Cherry stood looking up at the
roof; she did little talking; she watched Martin during every second he
spent there.

Her small heart was bursting with excitement. He had found easy
opportunities to talk to her a dozen times under cover of the general
noise. He had said wonderful and thrilling things.

"How is my own girl? Sweetheart, you're the sweetest rose of them all!
Cherry, do you suppose they can see from our faces how happy we are?"
Little sentences that meant nothing when other lips spoke them, but
that his voice made immortal.

Looking up at him, she thought of the glorious days ahead. How they
would all wonder and exclaim; yes, and how the girls would envy her!
Little Cherry, just eighteen, going to be married, and married to a man
that Alix or Anne would have been only too glad to win! A real man,
from the outside world, a man of twenty-eight, ten years older than she
was. And how the letters and presents and gowns and plans would begin
to flutter through the bungalow--she would be married in cafe-au-lait
rajah cloth, as Miss Pinckney in San Francisco was; she would be Mrs.
Lloyd! She could chaperone Alix and Anne--

There was a rending, slipping noise on the roof, a scream from Martin,
and shouts from the doctor and Peter. With a great sliding and rushing
of the refractory sprays, and with a horrifying stumbling and falling,
down came Martin, caught in a great rope of the creeper, almost at her
feet.

A time of great running and calling ensued. Cherry dropped on her knees
beside him, and had his head on her arm for a moment; then her father
took her place, and Alix, with an astonished look at the younger girl's
wet eyes, drew her sister away. Immediately afterward Martin sat up,
looked bewilderedly about from one face to another, looked at his
scratched wrist and said "Gee!" in a thoughtful tone. Anne, coming out
with sandwiches, joined in the general laugh.

"You scared Cherry out of ten years' growth!" Alix reproached Martin.

"I--I thought he might have hurt himself!" Cherry said, in the softest
of little-girl voices, and with her shy little head hanging. Anne
decided that it was becoming her clear duty to talk to Cherry.

"My dear," she said, later that same afternoon, when by chance she was
alone with her little cousin, "don't you think perhaps it would be a
little more dignified to treat Mr. Lloyd with more formality? He likes
you, dear, of course. But a man wants to respect as well as like a
pretty girl, and I am afraid--Uncle has noticed it!" she interrupted
herself quickly, as Cherry tossed her head scornfully. "He spoke of it
last night, and Alix tells me that you are calling Mr. Lloyd 'Martin!'
Now, dearie, Martin Lloyd is fully ten years---"

"Then Alix is a tattle-tale!" Cherry said childishly.

"I don't know about that," Anne said gently, although perhaps it would
have been more generous in her to add that Alix had made the comment
gleefully, and almost admiringly. "But that isn't important. The point
is that you are only a young girl--"

"I wish you would all mind your own royal business for about five
seconds!" Cherry said, rudely and impatiently. She was in her own room,
rummaging on the upper shelf of the closet for a certain hat. She
secured the hat now, and ran unceremoniously away from her admonitor,
to join Alix, Peter, and Martin for the daily ceremony of walking into
the village for the mail.

Anne followed her downstairs sedately, perhaps a little dashed
presently to discover that this dignified proceeding had lost her the
walk. They were all gone. The house was very still, early summer
sweetness was drifting through wide-opened windows and doors; the long
day was slowly declining. In the woods close to the door a really
summery hum of insect life was stirring. Hong, in dull minor gutturals,
jabbered somewhere in the far distance to a friend. Anne peeped into
the deserted living room, softened through all its pleasant shabbiness
into real beauty by the shafts of sunset red that came in through the
casement windows; and was deliberating between various becoming
occupations--for Martin might walk back with the girls--when her uncle
called her.

He was sitting in the little room that was still called his office, but
that was really his study now, and the late afternoon light, through
the replaced rose vine, streamed in on the shabby books and the green
lampshade and the cluttered desk.

"Anne--you weren't there when that young chap tumbled. But I've been
worrying about it a little. There's no question--there's no question
that she--that Cherry--called him by his name. 'Martin,' she called
him."

Anne had crossed to the shadowy doorway; she stood still.

"It can't be!" protested the doctor, uneasily. "Did Alix say anything
to you about it?"

"She said that," Anne admitted, drily.

"You've not noticed anything between him and Cherry?" pursued the
doctor. "A girl might call a man by his name, I suppose--"

"I don't think there has been anything to notice," Anne stated, in a
level tone.

"You don't?" the doctor echoed, in relief, peering at her. She could
meet his look with a smile, but in her heart were the same thoughts
that Cherry had been innocently indulging, under the rose vine an hour
ago, and the dream that had been Heaven to Cherry was Purgatory to
Anne. Cherry married, Cherry receiving cups and presents and gowns,
Cherry, Mrs. Lloyd, with a plain gold ring on her young, childish hand,
Cherry able to patronize and chaperone Alix and Anne--! "I half fancied
that it might be you, Anne," her uncle added, "although I know what a
sensible little head you have!" "I'm afraid I'm a trifle exacting where
men are concerned!" Anne said, understanding perfectly that her pride
was being shielded, but hurt to the heart, nevertheless.

"Well, it must be stopped, if it has begun," decided her uncle. "I
can't permit it--I'd forgotten how the little witch grows!"

"He isn't as eligible for Cherry as for me, then?" Anne asked lightly.
But her smile disarmed the unsuspicious old man, and he answered
honestly:

"You're quite different, Anne. You were older at eighteen than she'll
be at twenty-four; you could hold your own--you could, in a way, make
your own life! She--why, she's only an innocent little girl; she's got
dolls in the attic; we were teasing her about turning up her hair last
week!"

Again Anne was silent. It occurred to her to laugh at the absurdity of
these quick suspicions, but they had already seized upon her with the
curious tenacity of truth; already she had accepted the fact that what
yesterday would have been the unbelievable maximum of humiliation and
hurt was true to-day, and less than the whole bitter truth!

She was not in love with Martin Lloyd; she was not as susceptible as
the much younger Cherry, and she had not had his urging to help her to
a quick surrender. But for the first time in her life she had seen an
absolutely suitable man, a man whose work, position, looks, name, and
character fitted her rather exacting standard, and for the first time
she had let herself think confidently of being wooed and won. It was
all so right, so dignified, so fitting. She had been the light of her
uncle's eyes, and the little capable keeper of his house for years; she
had been reminding her own friends of this frequently during the past
year or two; now she was ready to step into a nest of her own.

Standing there in the doorway, she tasted the last bitter dregs of the
dream. It was all over. Anne was at the age that sets twenty-five years
as the definite boundary of spinsterhood. She would be twenty-five in
August.

Alix came in from her walk glowing, and full of a great discovery.

"Dad," she said eagerly, taking her place at the supper table, "what do
you think! I'll bet you a dollar that man is falling in love with our
Cherry!"

Anne, at the head of the table, looked pained, but there was genuine
apprehension in the doctor's face.

"Where is your sister?" he asked.

"Down there by the gate," Alix answered. "They're gazing soulfully into
each other's eyes, and all that! Peter went home. But CHERRY--with a
beau! Isn't that the ultimate extension of the limit! I'm crazy about
it--I think it's great. An engineer, Dad, and Mrs. North's nephew, and
he has a fine job in a mine somewhere," she summarized
enthusiastically, "you couldn't ask anything better than that, could
you? Could you, Dad? I love weddings! This'll be the third I've been
to!"

"All this seems to have come up very suddenly," the doctor said,
dazedly, rumpling his gray hair with a fine old hand. "I don't imagine
your sister is taking it as seriously as you and Anne seem inclined
to---"

"Oh, does Anne think so!" Alix exclaimed.

"I think Cherry is one of the fortunate girls destined to drift along
the surface of life," Anne said, "and to accept wifehood quite simply.
I only wish I were that type--"

"Oh, Nancy, what rot you talk every time you remember you had a year at
college!" Alix said, lightly. "Can't you let the poor kid fall in love
without yapping about types and biology and the cosmic urge---"

"Really, Alix, you use extraordinary language!" Anne remonstrated,
glancing at her uncle with outraged dignity. "And I am not aware that I
spoke of biology or the cosmic urge!" But her tone was not as
impersonal as her words, and she was flushed and even agitated. "Shan't
we begin, Uncle Lee?" she asked, patiently. "If Cherry is just down at
the gate there, she'll only be another minute--"

She was interrupted by Cherry herself. The girl came to the porch door,
and as she hesitated there a minute, with her smiling eyes seeking her
father's face, they saw that by one firm, small hand she drew her lover
beside her. Martin Lloyd's smiling face showed above hers in the
lamplight.

"Dad!" said Cherry, with a childish breath. "Dad! I've brought Martin
to supper!"




CHAPTER III


The three at the table did not move for perhaps twenty slow seconds.
Doctor Strickland, who had pushed back his chair, and whose hands were
resting on the table before him, stared at them steadily. Anne, with a
quick little hiss of surprise, smiled faintly. Alix, the unstilted,
widened her eyes, and opened her mouth in unaffected astonishment. For
there was no mistaking Cherry's tone.

"Doctor," said Martin, coming in, "this little girl of yours and I have
something to tell you!" The old man looked at him sharply, almost
sternly, looked about at the girls' faces, and was silent. But he
tightened his arm about Cherry, who had fluttered to the arm of his
chair.

"Are you surprised, Daddy?" Cherry laughed, with all a child's innocent
exultation. The next instant Anne and Martin were shaking hands, and
Alix had enveloped Cherry in an enthusiastic embrace.

"Surprised!" exclaimed Alix. "Why, aren't you surprised yourself!"

Her sister flushed exquisitely, and Martin laughed.

"We're just about knocked silly!" he confessed, and all the girls
laughed joyously.

There followed a delighted confusion of talk, when each in turn
remembered what she had noticed, what she had suspected, and what her
first emotion had been at this moment or that. Meanwhile a place was
made for Martin, and biscuits and omelette and honey and tea were put
into brisk circulation. Cherry left her place beside her father, with a
final kiss, and took her own chair, all dimples, flushes, smiles, and
shy confidence.

"And what are your plans?" Anne asked maternally, as she poured tea.

Her uncle, who had been silent during the excitement, mildly interposed:

"I think we needn't go too fast, young people! You've only known each
other a few weeks, after all; you must be pretty sure of yourselves
before taking anything like a decisive step. Plenty of time--plenty of
time. Mr. Lloyd can go back to his mine, and Cherry will wait for him--"

Cherry's wild-rose face coloured, and her whole body drooped.

"But I can be getting ready, and I can tell people, Dad?" she pleaded.

"We'll see," her father promised her, soothingly. He had promised her
thus vaguely when, as an imperative baby years ago, she had wanted the
impossible. But she was not a baby now.

"Ah, now--that won't do!" she pouted.

"You must give me a little time to get used to the idea of losing my
baby, pretty," her father said. "I confess that this thing seems to
have come upon me rather unexpectedly. Mr. Lloyd here and I must have
some talks about his plans--"

"I know exactly how you feel, Doctor," Martin said, sensibly and
sympathetically. "I realize that I should have come to you first, and
asked to pay my respects to your daughter--laugh, why don't you?" he
added to Alix, from whom an abrupt and startling laugh had indeed
escaped in good-natured scorn.

"Nobody does that any more!" the girl said, in self-defence. "It
sounded so old-fashioned!"

"Perhaps nobody does it any more, but I should have done it," Martin
said briskly and seriously. "Except that it all came over me with such
a rush. A week ago Cherry was only a most attractive child, to me. I'd
spoken to my aunt about her and had said that I envied the man that was
some day to win her, and that was all! Then the time came for me to get
back to work--and I found I couldn't go! I couldn't leave her. However,
I expect to be back here some time in the fall, and I thought to myself
that I'd see her then, and perhaps, THEN--And then came last night,
when I began to say good-byes, and--it happened! I know that you all
hardly know me, and I know that Cherry is pretty young to settle down,
but I think I can satisfy you, Doctor, that you give her into safe
hands, and I believe she'll never regret trusting me!"

He had gotten to his feet as he spoke, and was holding the back of his
chair, looking anxiously and eagerly into the old man's eyes. His tone,
in spite of his effort to keep it light, had taken on a depth and
gravity quite new to his hearers, and as Cherry, sitting next him, and
fired through all her girlish being by his eloquence, turned to lay a
small, warm hand on his own, the tears came to his eyes.

"Well--" said the doctor, touched himself, and in his gentlest tone,
"well! It had to come, perhaps, I can't promise her to you very soon,
Mr. Lloyd. But if you both are willing to wait, and if time proves this
to be the real feeling, I don't believe you'll find me hard on you!"

"That's all I ask, sir!" Martin said, resuming his seat and his dinner.
And for the rest of the meal harmony and gaiety reigned.

Alix shot an occasional glance at Anne, who was flushed, but as usual
busy and charming over the tea cups. Alix knew that Anne was inwardly
writhing; indeed she felt a sort of emotional shock herself. Yesterday
the mere talk of a lover for any one of them was delightfully thrilling
and vague--to-night Cherry was actually engaged! The older girls'
romantic speculations were flat enough now; Cherry had the actual thing.

There was no jealousy in Alix's heart, as there definitely was in
Anne's, of the man. But Alix felt envious of the superior
experience--why, he would kiss Cherry! No man had ever kissed Alix.
Cherry would be the admired and envied girl among all the girls;
married at eighteen, it was so beautifully flattering and satisfying to
be married young!

She looked at her father's face, a troubled face to-night. He was
watching the lovers regretfully; he did not disguise it. Their quick
plans, the readiness with which they solved the tremendous problems to
come, the light-heartedness with which they were hurrying toward the
future--had he and the older Charity been like that, twenty-five years
ago, when they had had supper at her mother's house, and told the great
news? He remembered himself, an eager, enthusiastic lover--had he
really given better promise then than this handsome young fellow was
giving to-night? He tried to remember the older Charity's mother; what
she had said, what expression her face had worn, and it seemed to him
that he could dimly recall reluctance and pain and gravity in that
long-ago look.

After dinner Cherry and Martin, in all the ecstatic first delight of
recognized love, went out to the wide front porch, where there were
wicker chairs, under the rose vines. Alix alone laughed at them as they
went. Anne, with a storm in her heart, played noisily on the piano, and
the doctor, after giving the doorway where Cherry had disappeared a
wistful look, restlessly took to his armchair and his book, in such
desolation of spirit as he had not known since the dark day of her
mother's death.

The next day Alix and the engaged pair walked up to invite Peter to a
tennis foursome on the old Blithedale court. It was a Saturday, and as
he usually dined with them, or asked them to dine with him on Saturday,
they were not surprised to find him busy with a charcoal burner, under
the trees, compounding a marvellous dish of chicken, tomatoes, cream,
and mushrooms, or to have his first words a caution not to tip things
over if they wanted any dinner. His Chinese cook was hovering about,
but Peter himself was chef.

"Stop your messing one second!" Alix said, catching him by the arm. And
as he straightened up she added, with a little awkward laugh,
"Congratulate these creatures--they--they're going to be married! Why
don't you congratulate them!"

Peter gave one long look at Martin and Cherry, who stood laughing, but
a little confused and self-conscious, too, in the grassy path. With a
shock like death in his heart, he realized that it was all over. Their
protection of her, their suspicions, had come too late. Blind child
that she was, she was committed to this fascinating and mysterious
adventure.

His face grew dark with a sudden rush of blood. "Peter hates to have
any one else know a thing before he does!" Alix explained this later.
But he went to them quickly, and shook hands with Martin, and was
presently reproaching Cherry for her secretiveness in his old, or
almost his old, way.

"Of course nobody's to know--Dad insisted on that!" said Cherry's soft,
proud little voice.

"Did you suspect yesterday, Peter?" Alix asked, tasting the sauce, and
bunching her fingers immediately afterward to send a rapturous kiss
into the air as an indication of its deliciousness. "Yesterday when
they went off after the tree, I mean?"

"I had my own suspicions!" he returned, and Cherry--his little, gay,
lovely Cherry!--laughed happily. He arranged that they were to play the
tennis here on his own courts, and later dine with him, but under his
hospitality and under the golden beauty of the day it was all
pain--pain--pain. It was agony to see her with him, beginning to taste
the rapture of love given and returned; it was agony to have the
conversation return always to Martin and Cherry, to the first love
affair. When they wandered away to the brook, and stood talking, the
girl's head dropped, her cheek flushed, but her face raised quickly now
and then for a flashing look, Peter felt that he could have killed this
newcomer, this thief, this usurper of the place that he himself might
have filled.

"Dad's always said he disapproved of long engagements," Alix commented,
amusedly, "but you ought to hear him now! This thing--he won't even
call it an engagement--it's an understanding, or a preference--is to be
a profound secret, and Cherry's to be twenty-one before any one else
but ourselves knows--"

"Your father is quite right!" Peter said sharply, in his most elderly
manner. They were resting after the first set, and Cherry and Martin,
in the opposite court, were out of hearing.

"When your hair gets tossed back that way," Alix observed innocently,
"lots more gray shows! I think you're turning gray pretty young, Peter,
aren't you? Are you forty yet? You're not forty, are you?"

"I'm thirty-six," Peter answered briefly. "My father was gray at
twenty-seven!" he added, after a pause.

"I have a gray hair," Alix started. "People talk about the first gray
hair--"

Peter did not hear her. There was beginning of a little hope in his
heart. Girls did not always fulfill their first engagements, did not
often do so, in fact. The thing was a secret; it might well come to
nothing, after all.

That was the beginning, and after it, although it was arranged between
them all that nothing should be changed, and that nobody but themselves
should share the secret, somehow life seemed different. Two or three
days after the momentous day of the raising of the rose tree, Martin
Lloyd went to his mine at El Nido, and the interrupted current of life
in the brown bungalow supposedly found its old groove.

But nothing was the same. The doctor, in the first place, was more
silent and thoughtful than the girls had ever seen him before. Anne and
Alix knew that he was not happy about Cherry's plans, if the younger
girl did not. He sighed, sat silently looking off from his book in the
summer evenings, fell into deep musing even at his meals. With Alix
only he talked of the engagement, and she knew from his comments, his
doubtful manner, that he felt it to be a mistake. The ten years'
difference between Cherry and Martin distressed him; he spoke of it
again and again. In June he sent Cherry to a long-planned house-party
at Menlo Park, but the girl came back after the third day. "I didn't
have any fun," she confessed, "I had to tell Olive, about me and
Martin, I mean. The boys there were all KIDS!"

Cherry was changed, too, and not only in the expected and natural ways,
Alix thought. She had always had a generous share of the family
devotion, but she entirely eclipsed the others now. Her daily letter
from Martin, her new prospects, not only increased her importance in
the other girls' eyes, but innocently inflated her own self-confidence.
She received a diamond ring, and although at her father's request she
did not show it for a few weeks, eventually it slipped mysteriously
from the little chamois bag on her neck, and duly appeared on her left
hand. She had promised to keep the engagement "or understanding, or
preference," a profound secret, but this was impossible. First one
intimate friend and then another was allowed to gasp and exclaim over
the news. The time came when Anne decided that it was not "decent" not
to let Martin's aunt know of it, when all these other people knew.
Finally came a dinner to the Norths', when Cherry's health was drunk,
and then the engagement presents began to come in.

"But it's July now," Cherry said, innocently, "and I think we were
pretty smart to keep it a secret so long! Don't you, Dad? And we've
been engaged three months, now, so that it looks as if waiting wasn't
going to change our minds, doesn't it?"

He could not chill her gay confidence; he had always spoiled her. Her
father only looked tenderly into the blue eyes, and tightened his big
arm protectingly about the slender young shoulders. But he was deeply
depressed. There seemed nothing to say. Cherry was of age; she was sure
of herself. She was truly in love with this presentable young man.
Doctor Strickland felt that he did not know Martin--the man to whom he
gave his lovely daughter he would have hoped to know intimately for
years. There was nothing to be said against young Lloyd. It was
only--mused the doctor, aghast--only what was being done in the world
every day. But he was staggered by the bright readiness with which all
of them--Cherry, Martin, the other girls--accepted the stupendous fact
that Cherry was to be married.

She was quite frankly and delightedly discussing trousseau now, too
entirely absorbed in her own happiness to see that the other girls had
lives to live as well as she. Did Anne mind if she divided her share of
the silver from theirs; did Alix think she would ever want any of
Mother's lace?

"I got my cards yesterday," she said one day, "I was passing the shop,
and I thought I might as well! The woman looked at me so queerly; she
said: 'Mrs. John Martin Lloyd. Are these for your mother?' 'No,' I
said, 'they're for me!' I wish you could have seen her look. Martin
says in to-day's letter that he thinks people will say I'm his
daughter, and Alix--he says that you are to come up to visit us, and
we're going to find you a fine husband! Won't it be funny to think of
your visiting ME! Oh, and Anne--did you see what Mrs. Fairfax sent me?
A great big glorious fur coat! She said I would need it up there, and I
guess I will! It's not new, you know; she says it isn't the real
present, but it can be cut down and it will look like new."

And so on and on. The other girls listened, sympathized, and rejoiced,
but it was not always easy. They could not get Cherry to be interested
in any of their plans for week-end house-parties, climbs, or picnics;
indeed, even to themselves their own lives seemed a trifle dull by
contrast.

Anne, as usual, took her part in the summer activities of the village;
she and Alix put on their white gowns and wide hats, and duly descended
to strawberry fetes and church fairs and concerts, and duly laughed
disarmingly when old friends expressed their pleasant suspicions of
Cherry.

But Alix voiced their feelings one summer afternoon when she was
sauntering into the village at her cousin's side, and began for the
first time a faint criticism of Martin.

"What makes Dad mad," Alix opined, "is that Martin had it all arranged
before he asked him! Took advantage of Dad, in a way. I don't think he
would have felt so if they both were kids, but after all, Martin's
twenty-eight--" Her voice fell. "Anne," she began, hesitatingly,
"sometimes when Mrs. North says so gaily that Martin was a TERROR in
college, and kept his whole family worrying, I feel sort of sorry for
Cherry! She doesn't know as much of life as we do," twenty-one-year-old
Alix finished soberly.

"I know!" Anne said quickly, perhaps a little glad to find a point
where Cherry needed sympathy.

"I have a feeling that Dad thinks," Alix pursued, "that it was just
because it was Cherry's first beau-I mean that Cherry waked up
suddenly, don't you know? It was as if she said to herself, 'Why, I'm a
woman! I can get kissed and get married and all the rest of it!'--I'm
expressing this beautifully," stumbled Mix.

"I often wonder Uncle Lee doesn't forbid it!" Anne said. She had never
had even a flitting thought of such a thing before, but she spoke now
as if the engagement had had her heartiest disapproval from the first.

"Oh, no--why should he!" Alix remonstrated. "Martin may be the best man
in the world for her. I confess," the girl added frankly, "I can't
stand his aunt. I always used to like Mrs. North, too. But lately, when
she's begun to tell Cherry that he is extravagant, and she must save
his money for him, and that he's often been in love before, but this
time she's sure it is the real thing, and that Martin has his father's
delicate stomach---"

Anne laughed out, in a merry fashion not usual with her of late.

"Oh, Alix, she DIDN'T!"

"Oh, yes, she did! And it makes me sort of sick. What does Cherry care
about anybody's delicate stomach!" Alix fell silent, broke out again
abruptly: "Anne--do you suppose she'll have a baby?"

Anne flushed. She considered this remark rather indelicate, and yet she
liked Alix's recognition of her superior knowledge of the subject.

"I think it very likely!" she answered calmly, after a moment's
hesitation. Her first impulse had been to answer, "I think it very
unlikely!"

"She doesn't know anything about babies!" Alix said, somewhat worried.

"I don't, either!" Anne confessed with honesty, her brow troubled.
"I've read things, here and there. I know SOMETHING, of course. But I
don't know much!"

"We've all read Dickens--and the Classic Myths, and things," Alix
submitted. "And of course she went with us the day Dad took us to
Faust! Is that about all there is to it, Nance?"

"Just--about, I guess!" Anne answered briefly. Both girls' faces were
red. They had rarely touched upon these and kindred subjects in their
talks with each other; they had never discussed them with any one else.
Anne liked to fancy herself rather worldly wise; Alix had an
independent brain and tongue. But in their household there was no older
woman to illumine their confused guessing with an occasional word now
and then, even if an unusually wholesome out-of-door life had not
distracted their attention from the problems raised in books, and their
isolation had not protected them from the careless talk of other girls
of their ages.

August brought Martin, and more changes. He was delighted with his work
in the El Nido mine, the "Emmy Younger," and everything he had to say
about it was amusing and interesting. It was still in a rather chaotic
condition, he reported, but the "stuff" was there, and he anticipated a
busy winter. He was to have a cottage, a pretty crude affair, in a few
weeks, right at the mine.

"How does that listen to you?" he asked Cherry. Cherry was sitting
beside him, at the dinner table, on the first night of his arrival. She
was thrilling still to the memory of his greeting kiss, its fresh odour
of shaving soap and witch hazel, and the clean touch of his
smooth-shaven cheek. She gave her father a demure and interrogative
glance. Martin, following it, immediately sobered.

"Just what is your position there?" the doctor asked, pleasantly.

"A little bit of everything now," Martin answered, readily and
respectfully. "Later, of course, I shall have my own special work. At
present I'm doing some of the assaying, and have charge of the
sluice-gang. They want me to make myself generally useful, make
suggestions, take hold in every way!"

"That's the way to get on," the older man said, approvingly. Cherry
looked admiringly, with all her heart in her eyes, at her
husband-to-be; the other girls were impressed, too. Martin brought a
new element, something masculine and modern, to their quiet dinner
table. Dad and Peter were men, to be sure, but they were different.
They were only a little more dear and amusing and real than the men in
Dickens' novels, long familiar and beloved in the household. But Martin
made the girls feel suddenly in touch with real life.

He had kissed Alix and Anne, upon arriving, and they liked it. Both the
older girls, in fact, were so impressed with the brilliancy of Cherry's
prospects, with the extraordinary distinction she possessed in having a
promised husband, with whom to walk about the woods and to talk of the
future, that they could forgive Cherry for being wrapped in a sort of
dream. Her new name, her new state, her new clothes, and home and
position filled her thoughts, and theirs. Martin had not been with them
more than a few hours before the engagement was openly discussed, and
there were constant references to Cherry's marriage.

It was a cool evening, and after dinner they all gathered about the
fire; Martin and Cherry murmuring together in the ingle seat, and the
others only occasionally drawing them into the general conversation.
Peter and the Norths had come in for coffee, Mrs. North giving Cherry a
maternal kiss as she greeted her. Alix thought that she had never seen
her sister look so pretty; Cherry was wearing a new dress, of
golden-brown corduroy velvet, with a deep collar and cuffs of old
embroidery that had belonged to her mother. Her silk stockings were
brown, and her russet slippers finished with square silver buckles. But
it was at the lovely face that Alix looked, the earnest, honest blue
eyes, the peach-bloom of the young cheeks, and the drooping crown of
shining hair.

Somehow, a few days later, wedding plans were in the air, and they were
all taking it for granted that Cherry and Martin were to be married
almost immediately; in October, in fact. The doctor at first persisted
that the event must wait until April, but Martin's reasonable
impatience, and Cherry's plaintive "But why, Daddy?" were too much for
him. Why, indeed? Cherry's mother had been married at eighteen, when
that mother's husband was more than ten years older than Martin Lloyd
was now.

"Would ye let it go on, Peter, eh?" the doctor asked, somewhat
embarrassed, one evening when he and Peter were walking from the train
in the late September twilight.

"Lord, don't ask me!" Peter said, gruffly. "I think she's too young to
marry any one--but the mischief's done now! You can't lock a girl in
her room, and she's the sort of girl that wouldn't be convinced by that
sort of argument if you did!"

"I think I'll talk to her," her father decided. "Anything is better
than having her make a mistake. I think she'll listen to me!" And a day
or two later he called her into the study. It was a quiet autumn
morning, foggy yet warm, with a dewy, woody sweetness in the air.

"Before we decide this thing finally," the doctor said, smiling into
her bright face, "before Martin writes his people that it's settled, I
want to ask you to do something. It's something you won't like to do,
my little girl. I want ye to wait a while--wait a year!"

It was said. He watched the brightness fade from her glowing face, she
lowered her eyes, the line of her mouth grew firm.

"Wait until you're twenty, dear. That's young enough. I've been
planning a full winter for you girls; I wanted to take a house in town,
entertain a little, look up a few friends! You trust me, Cherry. I only
ask you to take a little time--to be sure, dear!"

Silence. She shrugged faintly, blinked the downcast eyes as if tears
stung them.

"I know you don't like Martin, Dad!" she said, tremulously.

"No, no, my darling--you mustn't say that!" he said, in distress. "I
like him very much--I think he's a thoroughly fine fellow! I could
wish--just with an old father's selfishness--that he was a neighbour,
that he didn't plan to take you away entirely. That's natural, before I
give him the thing I hold most precious in the world. And that's just
it, Cherry. Wait a year or two, and perhaps it will be possible to
establish him here near us. You'll have a little money, dear, and
Martin says himself that he would much prefer office work to this
constant changing. Marriage is a great change, anyway. Everything is
different; your point of view, your very personality changes with it.
You'll be lonely, my dear. You'll miss your sister and Anne, and all
the old friends. There are cases where it must be so, of course. But in
your case--"

He stopped, discouraged. She was sitting opposite him at the shabby
writing table, her elbows resting upon it, her full lips pouting with
disappointment. Perhaps the one phrase of her new plans that pleased
Cherry most was that she was to be carried entirely away from the
familiar atmosphere in which she would always be "little Cherry," and
subject to suggestions and criticisms. Now she began slowly to shake
her head.

"Can't take your old father's word for it?" Doctor Strickland asked.

"It isn't that, Dad!" she protested eagerly and affectionately. "I'll
wait--I have waited! I'll wait until Christmas, or April, if you say
so! But it won't make any difference, nothing will. I love him and he
loves me, and we always will.

"You don't know," Cherry went on, with suddenly watering eyes, "you
don't KNOW what this summer of separation has meant to us both! If we
must wait longer, why, we will of course, but it will mean that I'll
never have a happy instant! It will mean that I am just living along
somehow--oh, I won't cry!" she interrupted, smiling with wet lashes,
"I'll try to bear it decently! But sometimes I feel as if I COULDN'T
bear it--"

A rush of tears choked her. She groped for a handkerchief, and felt, as
she had felt so many times, her father's handkerchief pressed into her
hand. The doctor sighed. There was nothing more to be said.

So he gave Cherry a wedding check that made her dance with joy, and
there was no more seriousness. There were gowns, dinners,
theatre-parties, and presents; every day brought its new surprise and
new delight to Cherry. She had her cream-coloured rajah silk, but her
sister and cousin persuaded her to be married in white, and it was
their hands that dressed the first bride when the great day came, and
fastened over her corn-coloured hair her mother's lace veil.

It was a day of soft sweetness, not too brightly summery, but warm and
still under the trees. Until ten o'clock the mountain and the tops of
the redwoods were tangled in scarfs of white fog, then the mellow
sunlight pierced it with sudden spectacular brightening and lifting.

The little brown house was full of flowers and laughter and coming and
going. Anne and Alix, flushed and excited in their bridesmaids' gowns,
were nervous and tired. They had made lists and addressed envelopes,
had decorated the house, had talked to milliners and florists and
caterers and dressmakers, had packed and repacked Cherry's trunk and
boxes. Cherry was tired and excited, too, but had no realization of it;
she was carried along upon a roseate cloud of happiness and excitement.

Martin's mother and stepfather had come down from Portland, and were
friendly, and pleased with everything.

"His mother," Alix told Peter, "is the sort of handsome person who
keeps a boarding-house and marries a rich, adoring old Klondike man."

"Is that what she did?" Peter whispered, amused.

"She's only sixteen years older than Martin is!" Alix confided further.
"She kissed Cherry and said, 'You're just a baby doll, that's what you
are!' And he calls me 'Ma'am,' and Cherry 'Sister!' They've got two
little children, a boy and a girl. Dad likes them both."

"Well, that's good!" Peter approved. "Does Cherry?"

"Oh, anything that belongs to Martin is perfect!" Alix answered, in
indulgent scorn, as she abruptly departed to see to some detail
concerning the carriages, the music, or the breakfast. She and Anne
were in a constant state of worry during the morning; their plans for
seating two score of persons were changed twenty times; they conspired
in agitated whispers behind doors and in the pantry.

But the first wedding went well. At twelve o'clock Charity Strickland
became Charity Lloyd, and was kissed and toasted and congratulated
until her lovely little face was burning with colour, and her blue eyes
were bewildered with fatigue. She stood in the drawing-room doorway,
her bouquet with its trailing ribbons in her gloved hands, and as each
one of all the old friends and neighbours made some little pre-arranged
speech of an amusing or emotional nature, she met it with a receptive
word or smile, hardly conscious of what she did or said. Sometimes she
freed her feet from the folds of her lacy train, and sometimes gave
Martin a glance backward and upward over her shoulder, once asking him
to hold her flowers with a smile that several guests afterward remarked
showed that those two couldn't see anything in the world but each other.

At two o'clock there were good-byes. Cherry had changed the wedding
satin for the cream-coloured rajah silk then, and wore the extravagant
hat. It would be many years before she would spend twenty-five dollars
for a hat again, and never again would she see bronzed cocks feathers
against bronzed straw without remembering the clean little
wood-smelling bedroom and the hour in which she had pinned her wedding
hat over her fair hair, and had gone, demure and radiant and confident,
to meet her husband in the old hallway.

She was confusedly kissed, passed from hand to hand, was conscious with
a sort of strange aching at her heart that she was not only far from
saying the usual heart-broken things in farewell, but was actually far
from feeling them. She laughed at Alix's last nonsense, promised to
write--wouldn't say good-bye--would see them all soon--was coming,
Martin--and so a last kiss for darling Dad, and good-bye and so many
thanks and thanks to them all!

She was gone. With her the uncertain autumn sunshine vanished, and a
shadow fell on the forest. The mountain, above the valley, was blotted
out with fog. The brown house seemed dark and empty when the last
guests had loitered away, and the last caterer had gathered up his
possessions and had gone. Hong was prosaically making mutton broth for
dinner; pyramids of sandwiches and little cakes stood on the sideboard.

Up in Cherry's room there was a litter of tissue papers, and pins and
powder were strewn on the bureau. The bed was mashed and disordered by
the weight of guests' hats and wraps that had lain there. A heap of
cards, still attached to ribbons and wires, were gathered on the
book-shelf, to be sent after Cherry and remind her of the donours of
gifts and flowers.

Across the lower bed that had been Cherry's a pale blue Japanese
wrapper had been flung. The girls had seen her wear it a hundred times;
she had slipped into it to change her gown a few hours ago. Anne,
excited and tired, picked it up, stared vaguely at it for a few
minutes, and then knelt down beside the bed, and began to cry. Alix,
the muscles about her mouth twitching, stood watching her.

"Funerals are gay compared to the way a wedding feels!" Alix said
finally. "I've eaten so much candy and wedding-cake and olives and
marrons, and whipped cream and crab salad that my skin feels like the
barrel of a musical box! I'm going to take a walk! Come on, Nancy."

"No, I don't want to!" Anne said, wiping her eyes, and sitting back on
her heels, with a long sigh and sniff. "I've got too much to do!"

Alix descended to find her father and Peter discussing fly-fishing, on
the porch steps. The doctor had changed his unwonted wedding finery for
his shabby old smoking jacket, but Peter still looked unnaturally well
dressed. Alix stepped down to sit between them, and her father's arm
went about her. She snuggled against him in an unusual mood of
tenderness and quiet.

"Be nice to me!" she said, whimsically. "I'm lonely!"

"H'm!" her father said, significantly, tightening his arm. Peter moved
up on the other side and locked his own arm in her free one. And so
they sat, silent, depressed, their shoulders touching, their sombre
eyes fixed upon the shadowy depths of the forest into which an October
fog was softly and noiselessly creeping.




CHAPTER IV


Meanwhile, the hot train sped on, and the drab autumn country flew by
the windows, and still the bride sat wrapped in her dream, smiling,
musing, rousing herself to notice the scenery. The lap of the
cream-coloured gown held magazines and a box of candy, and in the rack
above her head were the new camera and the new umbrella and the new
suitcase.

When Martin asked her if she liked to be a married woman, travelling
with her husband, she smiled and said that it seemed "funny." For the
most part she was silent, pleased and interested, but not quite her
usual unconcerned self. She and Alix, taking this trip, would have been
chattering like magpies. She and Martin had their dinner in the train,
and then she did brighten, trying to pierce with her eyes the darkness
outside, and getting only a lovely reflected face under bronzed cocks
feathers, instead. After dinner they had a long, murmured talk; she
began to droop sleepily now, although even this long day had not paled
her cheeks or visibly tired her.

At ten they stumbled out, cramped and over-heated, and smitten on tired
foreheads with a rush of icy mountain air.

"Is this the pl-l-ace?" yawned Cherry, clinging to his arm.

"This is the place, Baby Girl, El Nido, and not much of a place!" her
husband told her. "That's the Hotel McKinley, over there where the
lights are! We stay there to-night, and drive out to the mine
to-morrow. I'll manage the bags, but don't you stumble!"

She was wide-awake now, looking alertly about her at the dark streets
of the little town. Mud squelched beneath their feet, planks tilted.
Beside Martin Cherry entered the bright, cheerful lobby of a cheap
hotel where men were smoking and spitting. She was beside him at the
desk, and saw him write on the register, "J. M. Lloyd and wife." The
clerk pushed a key across the counter; Martin guided her to a rattling
elevator.

She had a fleeting thought of home; of Dad reading before the fire, of
the little brown room upstairs, with Alix, slender in her thin
nightgown, yawning over her prayers. A rush of reluctance--of
strangeness--of something like terror smote her. She fought the
homesickness down resolutely; everything would seem brighter to-morrow,
when the morning and the sunshine came again.

There was a brown and red carpet in the oblong of the room, and a brown
bureau, and a wide iron bed with a limp spread, and a peeling brown
washstand with a pitcher and basin. The boy lighted a flare of electric
lights which made the chocolate and gold wallpaper look like one
pattern in the light and another in the shadow. A man laughed in the
adjoining room; the voice seemed very near.

Cherry had never been in a hotel of this sort before; she learned later
that El Nido was extremely proud of it, with its rattling elevator and
its dining room on the "American Plan." It seemed to her cheap and
horrible; she did not want to stay in this room, and Martin, tipping
the boy and asking for ice-water, seemed somehow a part of this new
strangeness and crudeness. She began to be afraid that he would think
she was silly, presently, if she said her prayers as usual.

In the morning Martin hired a phaeton, and they drove out to the mine.
It had rained in the night, and there were pools of water on the soft
dirt road, but the sky was high and blue, and the air tingled with
sweetness and freshness after the shower. Cherry had had a good
breakfast, and was wearing a new gown; they stopped another phaeton on
the long, pleasant drive and Martin said to the fat man in it:

"Mr. Bates, I want to make you acquainted with my wife!"

"Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Lloyd!" said the fat man, pleasantly. Martin
told Cherry, when they passed him, that that was the superintendent of
the mine, and seemed pleased at the encounter. And Cherry smiled up at
the blue sky, and felt the warmth and silence of the day saturate her
whole being. Presently Martin put his arm about her, and the bay horse
dawdled along at his own sweet will, while Martin's deep voice told his
wife over and over again how adorable and beautiful she was, and how he
loved her.

Cherry listened happily, and for a little while the old sense of pride
and achievement came back--she was married, she was wearing a plain
gold ring! But after a few days that feeling vanished forever, and
instead it began to seem strange to her that she had ever been anything
else than Martin's wife. The other women at the mine were married; she
was married; and nobody seemed to think the thing remarkable in them,
or in her. She was, to be sure, younger and prettier than any of the
others, but the men she met here were not the sort whose admiration
would have satisfied her innocent ambition to have Martin's friends
flock about her adoringly, and more than that, they knew her to be
newly married, and left the young Lloyds to their presumably desired
isolation. And very soon Cherry found herself a little housewife among
other housewives, much more praised if she made a good shortcake than
because the tilt of her new hat was becoming.

For several days she and Martin laughed incessantly, and praised each
other incessantly, while they experimented with cooking, and ate
delicious gipsy meals. In these days Martin was always late at the
mine, and every evening he came home to find that ducks, or a jar of
honey, or a loaf of cake, had been contributed to Cherry's dinner by
the interested women in the near-by cottages. In all, there were not a
dozen families at the "Emmy Younger," and Cherry was watched with
interest and sympathy during her first efforts at housekeeping.

By midwinter she had settled down to the business of life, buying bacon
and lard and sugar and matches at the store of the mine, cooking and
cleaning, sweeping and making beds. She still kissed Martin good-bye
every morning, and met him with an affectionate rush at the door when
he came home, and they played Five Hundred evening after evening after
dinner, quarrelling for points, and laughing at each other, while rain
sluiced down on the "Emmy Younger," and dripped on the porch. But
sometimes she wondered how it had all come about, wondered what had
become of the violent emotions that had picked her out of the valley
home, and established her here, in this strange place, with this man
she had never seen a year ago.

Of these emotions little was left. She still liked Martin, she told
herself, and she still told him that she loved him. But she knew she
did not love him, and in such an association as theirs there can be no
liking. Her thoughts rarely rested on him; she was either thinking of
the prunes that were soaking, the firewood that was running low, the
towels that a wet breeze was blowing on the line; or she was far away,
drifting in vague realms where feelings entirely strange to this bare
little mining camp, and this hungry, busy, commonplace man, held sway.
Cherry was in the position of a leading lady mysteriously forced into a
minor role; she had never known what she wanted in life, and was
learning now in a hard school.

The first time that she quarrelled with Martin, she cried for an entire
day, with the old childish feeling that somehow her crying mattered,
somehow her abandonment to grief would help to straighten affairs. The
cause of the quarrel was a trifle; her father had sent her a Christmas
check, and she immediately sent to a San Francisco shop for a clock
that had taken her fancy months before.

Martin, who chanced to be pressed for money, although she did not know
it, was thunderstruck upon discovering that she had actually disposed
of fifty dollars so lightly. For several days a shadow hung over their
intercourse, and when the clock came, as large as a banjo, gilded and
quaint, he broke her heart afresh by pretending not to admire it.

But on Christmas Eve he was delayed at the mine, and Cherry, smitten
suddenly with the bitterness of having their first Christmas spoiled in
this way, sat up for him, huddled in her silk wrapper by the air-tight
stove. She was awakened by feeling herself lowered tenderly into bed,
and raised warm arms to clasp his neck, and they kissed each other. The
little house was warm and comfortable, they had a turkey to roast on
the morrow, and ranged on the table were the home boxes, and a stack of
unopened envelopes waiting for Christmas morning.

The next day they laughed at the clock together, and after that peace
reigned for several weeks. But it was inevitable that another quarrel
should come and then another; Cherry was young and undisciplined,
perhaps not more selfish than other girls of her age, but self-centred
and unreasonable. She had to learn self-control, and she hated to
control herself. She had to economize when poverty possessed neither
picturesqueness nor interest. They were always several weeks late in
the payment of domestic bills, and these recurring reminders of money
stringency maddened Cherry. Sometimes she summed it up, with angry
tears, reminding him that she was still wearing her trousseau dresses,
and had no maid, and never went anywhere--!

But she developed steadily. As she grew skilful in managing her little
house, she also grew in the art of managing her husband and herself.
She became clever at avoiding causes of disagreement; she listened,
nodded, agreed, with a boiling heart, and had the satisfaction of
having Martin's viewpoint veer the next day, or the next hour, to meet
her own secret conviction. Martin's opinion, she told herself wearily,
as she swept and cooked and marketed busily, didn't matter anyhow. He
would rage and storm at his superiors, he would threaten and brood, and
then it would all be forgotten, time after time after time. Silent,
absent-minded, looking closely at a burn upon her smooth arm or
pleating her checked apron, Cherry would sit opposite him at his late
lunch.

"I suppose you don't agree with me?" he would interrupt himself to ask
scowlingly.

"Mart--" The innocent blue eyes would be raised vaguely. "I don't know
anything about it, dear. If Mr. Taylor--"

"Well, you know what I tell you, don't you?"

"Yes, dear. But--"

"For God's sake don't call me DEAR when you--"

"Mart!" Her dignity always rose in arms. "Please don't get excited."

"Well!" His tone would be modified, as the appetizing little meal was
dispatched. "But Lord, you do make me so mad, sitting there criticizing
me--I can always tell when you're in sympathy with me--my Lord, I wish
you had to go up against these fellows sometimes--" The grumbling voice
would go on and on; Cherry would pause at the door, carrying out
plates, to have him finish a phrase; would nod sympathizingly as she
set his dessert before him. But her soul was like some living thing
spun into a cocoon, hearing the sounds of life only vaguely, interested
in them not at all.

Martin seemed satisfied, and all their little world accepted her as a
matter of course. Pretty little Mrs. Lloyd went every morning into the
Company Store as the only store at the mine was called, and smiled over
her shopping; she stopped perhaps at the office to speak to her
husband; she met some other woman wheeling a baby up to the cottages,
and they gossiped together. She and her husband dined and played cards
now and then with a neighbour and his wife, and they gave dinners in
return, when the men praised every dish extravagantly, and the woman
laughed at their greedy enthusiasms. Like the other women, she had her
small domestic ambitions; Mrs. Brown wanted a meat-chopper; Mrs.
White's one desire was to have a curly maple bedroom set; Mrs. Lloyd
wanted a standing mahogany lamp for the sitting room.

But under it all Cherry knew that something young and irresponsible and
confident in her had been killed. She never liked to think of the
valley, of the fogs and the spokes of sunlight under the redwood
aisles, of Alix and the dogs and the dreamy evenings by the fire. And
especially she did not like to think of that eighteenth birthday, and
herself thrilling and ecstatic because the strange young man from Mrs.
North's had stared at her, in her sticky apron, with so new and
disturbing a smile in his eyes.




CHAPTER V


So winter passed at the mine, and at the brown house under the shoulder
of Tamalpais. Alix still kept her bedroom windows open, but the rain
tore in, and Anne protested at the ensuing stains on the pantry
ceiling. Creeks rushed swollen and yellow; fog smothered the mountain
peak; the forest floor oozed moisture. Spring came reluctantly; muddy
boots cluttered the doctor's hearth, for he and Alix and Peter tramped
for miles through the woods and over the hills, bringing home trillium
and pungent wild currant blossoms, and filling the house with blooms.

Cherry's wedding, once satisfactorily over, was a cause of great
satisfaction to her sister and cousin. They had stepped back duly, to
give her the centre of the stage; they had admired and congratulated,
had helped her in all hearty generosity. They had listened to her
praises of Martin and his of her, and had given her more than her share
of the household treasures of silver spoons and yellowed old lace.

And now that she was gone they enjoyed their own lives again, and cast
over hers the glamour that novelty and distance never fail to give.
Cherry, married and keeping house and managing affairs, was an object
of romantic interest. The girls surmised that Cherry must be making
friends; that everyone must admire her; that Martin would be rich some
day, without doubt. When her letters came, there was always animated
chatter about the fire.

Cherry wrote regularly, now and then assuring them that she was the
same old Cherry. She described her tiny house right at the mine,
looking down at the rough scaffoldings that covered the mouth of the
tunnels, and the long sheds of the plant, and the bare big building
that was the men's boarding-house. Martin's associates brought her
trout and ducks, she wrote; she and Martin had driven three hundred
miles in the superintendent's car; she was preparing for a card party.

"Think of little old Cherry going off on week-end trips with three
men!" Alix would say proudly. "Think of Cherry giving a card party!"
Anne perhaps would make no comment, but she often felt a pang of envy.
Cherry seemed to have everything.

Alix was working hard with her music this winter, aided and abetted by
Peter, who was tireless in bringing her songs and taking her to
concerts. Suddenly, without warning, there was a newcomer in the
circle, a sleek-headed brown-haired little man known as Justin Little.

He had been introduced at some party to Anne and Alix; he called; he
was presently taking Anne to a lecture. Anne now began to laugh at him
and say that he was "too ridiculous," but she did not allow any one
else to say so. On the contrary, she told Alix at various times that
his mother had been one of the old Maryland Percies, and his
great-grandfather was mentioned in a book by Sir Walter Scott, and that
one had to respect the man, even if one didn't choose to marry him.

"Marry him!" Alix had echoed in simple amazement. Marry him--what was
all this sudden change in the household when a man could no sooner
appear than some girl began to talk of marriage? Alix had always rather
fancied the idea that all girls had an opportunity of capriciously
choosing from a dozen eligible swains, but Cherry had quickly anchored
herself to the first strange man that appeared, and here was Anne
dimpling and looking demure over a small, neat youth just out of law
school. Certainly the little person of Justin Little was a strange
harbour for all Anne's vague dreams of a conquering hero. Stupefied,
Alix watched the affair progress.

"I don't imagine it's serious!" her father said on an April walk.
Peter, tramping beside them, was interested but silent.

"My dear father," the girl protested, "have you listened to them?
They've been contending for weeks that they were just remarkably good
friends--that's why she calls him Frenny!"

"Ah--I see!" the doctor said mildly, as Peter's wild laugh burst forth.

"But now," Alix pursued, "she's told him that as she cannot be what he
wishes, they had better not meet!"

"Poor Anne!" the old doctor commented.

"Poor nothing! She's having the time of her life," her cousin said
unfeelingly. "She told me to-day that she was afraid that she had
checked one of the most brilliant careers at the bar."

"I had no idea of all this!" the doctor confessed, amazed. "I've seen
the young man--noticed him about. Well--well--well! Anne, too."

"You and me next, little sweetums," suggested Peter, dropping down
beside the doctor, who had seated himself, panting, upon a log.

Alix, the dog's silky head under her hand, was resting against the prop
formed by a great tree trunk behind her shoulders, and looking down at
the two men. She grinned.

"Nothingstirring, Puddeny-woodeny!" she answered, blandly.

The old man looked from Peter's smiling, indifferent face to his
daughter's unembarrassed smile; shook his head in puzzled fashion, and
returned to his pocket the big handkerchief with which he had been
wiping his forehead.

"There ye are!" he said, shrugging. "Cherry goes gaily off with a man
she's only known for a few weeks; Anne dresses up this new fellow with
goodness knows what qualities; and you and Alix here, neighbours all
your lives, laugh as if marriage was all a joke!"

"Our marriage would be, darling," Alix assured him. "But, Dad, if you
would like me to marry Peter, by George, I will!" she added, dutifully.
"Peter, consider yourself betrothed! Bucky," she said to the dog,
"dat's oo new Daddy!"

Neither man paid her the slightest attention. Peter scraped a lump of
dried mud from the calf of his high boots, and the doctor musingly
looked back along the rough trail they had climbed.

"I'd have felt safer--I'd feel very safe to have one of my girls in
your care, Peter," the older man said at last, thoughtfully. "I hate to
see them scatter. Well!"

He sighed, smiled, and got to his feet. "That's not in our hands," he
said, cheerfully.

Alix, without moving, sent her glance from his face to Peter's, and
their eyes met. Only a few words, spoken half in earnest, on a spring
morning tramp, and yet they had their place, in her memory and Peter's,
and were to return to them after a time, and influence them more
seriously than either the man, or the grinning girl, or the old man
himself ever dreamed.

The glance lasted only a second, then Alix, who had been carefully
removing burrs from the soft tangle of the dog's tasselled ears, took
the trail again with great, boyish springs of her bloomered legs.

"Father," said she, "am I to understand that you disapprove of my
choice?"

"I hope," her father answered, seriously, "that when you do marry you
will get a man half as good as Peter!"

"Thank you!" Peter said, gravely, more as a rebuke to the incorrigible
Alix than because he was giving the conversation much attention.

Alix had time for no comment, for at this moment she placed her foot
upon an unsubstantial root and slid down upon the two men with such an
unpremeditated rush of heavy boots, wet loam, loosened rocks, and
cascading earth, that the footing of them all was threatened, and it
was only after much shouting, staggering, balancing, and clutching that
they resumed their climb. Peter was then nursing a wrist that had been
wrenched in the confusion, looking away from it only to give the loudly
singing Alix an occasional resentful glance.

"You could omit some of those cries!" he presently observed.

"I thought you liked 'The Lotos Flower'?" Alix called back.

"I just proved that I do," Peter said neatly, and the doctor, and Alix
herself, laughed joyously.

In June came the blissful hour in which Anne, all blushes and smiles,
could come to her uncle with a dutiful message from the respectfully
adoring Justin. Their friendship, said Anne, had ripened into something
deeper.

"Justin wants to have a frank talk with you, Uncle," Anne said, "and of
course I'm not to go until you are sure you can spare me, and unless
you feel that you can trust him utterly!"

"And remember that you aren't losing a daughter, but gaining a son--Oh,
help!" Alix added. Anne gave her a reproachful glance, but found it
impossible to be angry with her. She was too genuinely delighted with
her cousin's happiness and too helpful with all the new plans. Anne's
engagement cups were ranged on the table where Cherry's had stood, and
where Cherry had talked of a coffee-coloured rajah silk Anne discussed
the merits of a "smart but handsome blue tailormade."

The wedding was to be in September, not quite a year after Cherry's
wedding. Alix wrote her sister pages about it, always ending with the
emphatic declaration that Cherry must come down for the wedding.

Cherry read of it with a strange pang. Somehow it robbed her own
marriage of flavour and charm to have Anne so quickly following in her
footsteps. She was homesick. She dreamed continually of the cool, high
valley, the scented aisles of the deep forest, the mountain rearing its
rough summit to the pale blue of summer skies.

June passed; July passed; it was hot at the "Emmy Younger." August came
in on a furnace breath; Cherry felt headachy, languid, and half sick
all the time. She hated housekeeping in this weather; hated the smells
of dry tin sink and wooden floor, of milk bottles and lard tins. Martin
had said that he could not possibly get away, even for the week of
Anne's wedding, but Cherry began to wonder if he would let her go alone.

"If he doesn't, I shall be sick!" she fretted to herself, in a certain
burning noontime, toward the middle of August. Blazing heat had been
pouring over the mine since six o'clock; there seemed to have been no
night. Martin, who had been playing poker the night before, was
sleeping late this morning. He was proud of the little wife who so
generously spared him for an occasional game, and always allowed him to
sleep far into the following morning. Other wives at the mine were not
so amiable where poker was concerned. But Martin, coming home at three
o'clock, dazed with close air and cigar smoke, had awakened his wife to
tell her that he would be "dead" in the morning, and Cherry had
accordingly crept about her own dressing noiselessly, had darkened the
bedroom, and eaten her own breakfast without the clatter of a dish,
putting the coffee aside to be reheated for him when he awakened. Now
she was sitting by the window, panting in the noon heat, and looking
down upon a dazzle of dust and ugliness and smothering hotness. She was
thinking, as it chanced, of the big forest at home, and of a certain
day--just one of their happy days!--only a year ago, when she had lain
for a dreamy hour on the soft forest floor, staring up idly through the
laced fanlike branches, and she thought of her father, with his mild
voice and ready smile; and some emotion, almost like fear, came over
her. For the first time she asked herself, in honest bewilderment, why
she had married.

The heat deepened and strengthened and increased as the burning day
wore on. Martin waked up, hot and headachy, and having further
distressed himself with strong coffee and eggs, departed into the
dusty, motionless furnace of out-of-doors. The far brown hills
shimmered and swam, the "Emmy Younger" looked its barest, its ugliest,
its least attractive self. Cherry moved slowly about the kitchen; her
head ached; it was a day of sickening odours. The ice man had failed
them again, the soup had soured, and after she had thrown it away
Cherry felt as if the grease and the smell of it still clung to her
fingers.

There was a shadow in the doorway; she looked up surprised. For a
minute the tall figure in striped linen and the smiling face under the
flowery hat seemed those of a stranger. Then Cherry cried out, and
laughed, and in another instant was crying in Alix's arms.

Alix cried, too, but it was with a great rush of pity and tenderness
for Cherry. Alix had not young love and novelty to soften the outlines
of the "Emmy Younger," and she felt, as she frankly wrote later, to her
father, "at last convinced that there is a hell!" The heat and bareness
and ugliness of the mine might have been overlooked, but this poor
little house of Cherry's, this wood stove draining white ashes, this
tin sink with its pump, and the bathroom with neither faucets nor
drain, almost bewildered Alix with their discomfort.

Even more bewildering was the change in Cherry. There was a certain
hardening that impressed Alix at once. There was a weary sort of
patience, a disillusioned concession to the drabness of married life.
Alix, after meeting some of the other wives at the mine--there were but
five or six--saw that Cherry had been affected by them. There was
general sighing over the housework, a mild conviction that men were all
selfish and unreasonable. "And I must say," Alix's first letter to her
father admitted, "that the men here are all dogs, except the ones that
are under dogs!"

But she allowed the younger sister to see nothing of this. Indeed,
Cherry so brightened under the stimulus of Alix's companionship that
Martin told her that she was more like her old self than she had been
for months. Joyously she divided her responsibilities with Alix,
explaining the difficulties of marketing and housekeeping, and joyously
Alix assumed them. Her vitality infected the whole household, and,
indeed, the mine as well. She flirted, cooked, entertained, talked
incessantly; she bullied Martin and laughed at him, and it did him good.

Perhaps, thought Alix, rather appalled at Cherry's attitude, Cherry had
been too young for wifehood. Sometimes she spoiled and humoured Martin,
and sometimes quarrelled with him childishly, scolding and fretting for
her own way, and angry with conditions over which neither he nor she
had any control. Alix was surprised to see the old pout, and hear the
old phrase of Cherry's indulged girlhood: "I don't think this is any
FUN!"

"Anne isn't one half as clever or as pretty as Cherry, but she'll make
a better wife!" was Alix's conclusion. She gave them spirited accounts
of Anne's affair. "He's a nice little academic fellow," she said of
Justin Little. "If he had a flatiron in each hand he'd probably weigh
close to a hundred pounds! He's a--well, a sort of DAMP-LOOKING youth,
if you know what I mean! I always want to take a crash towel and dry
him off!"

"Fancy Anne with a shrimp like that!" Cherry said, with a proud look at
her own man's fine height.

"Anne was delicious!" Alix further revealed. "They used to take
dignified walks on Sundays. I used to tease her, and she'd get so mad
she'd ask Dad to ask me to be more refined. She said that Mr. Little
was a most unusual man, and it was belittling to his dignity to have me
suppose that a man and a woman couldn't have an intellectual
friendship. This in May, my dear, and after the thing was settled and
Anne had cried, and written notes, and Justin had gone to Dad and asked
where he could buy a second-hand revolver--"

"Oh, Alexandra Strickland, you're making up!" Cherry went back
naturally to the old nursery phrase.

"Honestly--cross my heart!" Alix assured her. "That's the way they
managed it; they solemnly discussed it and worked it out on paper, and
Justin's mother called on Anne--she's an awful old girl, too, she looks
like a totem pole--and Anne called on his aunts, and then he asked Dad,
'as Anne's male relative,' he said, and it was all settled. And
THEN--THEN Anne became the mushiest thing I ever saw! And not only
mushy, Cherry, but proudly and openly mushy. She'd catch Justin's hand
up, at the table, and say 'Frenny--'"

"'Frenny?'" echoed Cherry, who had laughed until actual tears stood in
her eyes.

"That's short for 'friend,' do you see? Because of this platonic
intellectual friendship that started everything, you know. She'd catch
up his hand and say, 'Frenny, show Uncle what an aristocratic hand
you've got.' My dear, she'll keep me awake nights repeating things he's
said to her: 'He's so wonderful, Alix. He's the simplest and at the
same time the cleverest man I ever knew.'"

"He sounds awful to me," Cherry said.

"He's not, really. Only it seems that he belongs to the oldest family
in America, or something, and is the only descendent--"

"Money?" Cherry asked, interestedly.

"No, I don't think money, exactly. At least I know he is getting a
hundred a month in his uncle's law office, and Dad thinks they ought to
wait until they have a little more. She'll have something, you know,"
Alix added, after a moment's thought.

"Your cousin?" Martin asked, taking his pipe out of his mouth.

"Well, her father went into the fire-extinguisher thing with Dad," Alix
elucidated, "and evidently she and Justin have had deep, soulful
thoughts about it. Anyway, the other day she said--you know her way,
Cherry--'Tell me, Uncle, frankly and honestly, may Justin and I draw
out my share for that little home that is going to mean so much to
us--'"

"I can hear her!" giggled Cherry.

"Dad immediately said that she COULD, of course," Alix went on. "He's
going to look the whole thing up. He was adorable about it. He said,
'It will do more than build you a little home, my dear!'"

"We'll get a slice of that some time," Cherry said, thoughtfully,
glancing at her husband. "I don't mean when Dad dies either," she
added, in quick affection. "I mean that he might build us a little home
some day in Mill Valley."

"Gee, how he'd love it!" Alix said, enthusiastically.

"I married Cherry for her money," Martin confessed.

"As a matter of fact," Cherry contradicted him, vivaciously, animated
even by the thought of a change and a home, "we have never even spoken
of it before, have we, Mart?"

"I never heard of it before," he admitted, smiling, as he knocked the
ashes from his pipe. "If I leave the 'Emmy Younger' in October, and go
into the Red Creek proposition, I shall be making a good deal myself.
But it's pleasant to know that Cherry will come in for a nest-egg some
day!"

"Mart doesn't care a scrap for money!" Cherry said to her sister, in
the old loyal way. Since Alix's arrival she had somehow liked Martin
better. Perhaps Alix brought to her sister with a whiff of the old
atmosphere, the old content, the old pride, and the old point-of-view.
Presently the visitor boldly suggested that they should both go home
together for the wedding, and Martin, to Cherry's amazement, agreed
good-naturedly.

"But, Mart, how'll you get along?" his wife asked, anxiously. She had
fumed and fussed and puttered and toiled over the care of these four
rooms for so long that it seemed unbelievable that her place might be
vacated even for a day.

"Oh, I'll get along fine!" he answered, indifferently. Cherry, with a
great sigh of relief and delight, abandoned the whole problem; milk
bottles, fire wood, groceries, dust, and laundry slipped from her mind
as if they had never been. On the last day of August, in the
cream-coloured silk and the expensive hat again, yet looking, Alix
thought, strangely unlike the bride that had been Cherry, she and her
sister happily departed for cooler regions. Martin took them to the
train, kissed his sister-in-law gaily, and then his wife affectionately,

"Be a good little girl, Babe," he said, "and write me!"

"Oh, I will--I will!" Cherry looked after him smilingly from the car
window. "He really is an old dear!" she told Alix.




CHAPTER VI


But when at the end of the long day they reached the valley, and when
her father came innocently into the garden and stood staring vaguely at
her for a moment--for her visit, and the day of Alix's return had been
kept a secret--her first act was to burst into tears. She clung to the
fatherly shoulder as if she were a storm-beaten bird safely home again,
and although she immediately laughed at herself, and told the
sympathetically watching Peter and Alix that she didn't know what was
the matter with her, it was only to interrupt the words with fresh
tears.

Tears of joy, she told them, laughing at the moisture in her father's
eyes. Hanging on his arm, she went back into the old sitting room
again, under the banksia rose; went up the brown stairway to the old,
clean, woody-smelling bedroom. Her hat and wraps went into the closet;
she danced and exclaimed and exulted over every familiar detail.

She and Alix ran downstairs before supper, and into the garden, and
Cherry drew deep, refreshing breaths of the cool air and laughed over
every bush and flower. Peter came out to join them, her father came
down, and she kissed him again; she could not be close enough to him.
She had a special joyous word for Hong; she laughed and teased and
questioned Anne, when Anne and Justin came back from an afternoon
concert in the city, with an interest and enthusiasm most gratifying to
both.

After dinner she had her old place on the arm of her father's porch
chair; Alix, with Buck's smooth head in her lap, sat on the porch step
beside Peter, and the lovers murmured from the darkness of the hammock
under the shadow of the rose vine. It was happy talk in the sweet
evening coolness; everybody seemed harmonious and in sympathy to-night.
Alix asked Peter's advice regarding her White Minorcas and respectfully
promised to act upon it, and Cherry showed him a new side, an
affectionate, little sisterly deference and confidence quite different
from her old childish sulkiness and pretty caprice.

"Bedtime!" said her father presently, and she laughed in sheer pleasure.

"Daddy--that sounds so nice again!"

"But you do look fagged and pale, little girl," he told her. "You're to
stay in bed in the morning."

"Oh, I'll be down!" she assured him. But she did not come down in the
morning, none the less. She was tired in soul and body, and glad to let
them spoil her again, glad to rest and sleep in the heavenly peace and
quiet of the old home.

Midsummer heat was upon the little valley, but here under the redwoods
there was always coolness; delicious odours of warm sap and loamy
sweetness drifted into Cherry's darkened room; the morning was fresh
and foggy, and the night before she had smiled drowsily to stir from
first sleep and find her father bending over her, drawing up an extra
blanket in the old way. All night long she slept deeply and sweetly, as
she had slept through all the nights of childhood; it was ten o'clock
when Alix came smiling in with a breakfast tray. Presently she carried
it away, and Cherry, with a deep sigh from the fullness of her content,
turned on her side and drowsed again.

Waking, after a while, she locked her hands under her head, and lay
listening happily to the old and familiar sounds of home. She heard
Hong bargaining in his own minor chatter with a fruit vendor, and Alix
and her father chuckling over some small confidence in the porch. She
heard the subdued clink of dishes, the squawk of a surprised chicken,
and the girls' murmuring voices.

It was Saturday, Cherry remembered, when Peter's voice suddenly sounded
above the others and was hastily hushed for her sake; Peter was always
there at three o'clock on Saturdays. There was another voice, too,
pleasant and crisp and even a trifle fastidious; that must be Justin.

Late in the afternoon, rested, fresh, and her old sweet self in the
white ruffles, she came down to join them. They had settled themselves
under the redwoods, Anne and Justin, Peter and Alix and Buck, the dog,
all jumped up to greet her. Cherry very quietly subsided into a wicker
chair, listened rather than talked, moved her lovely eyes
affectionately from one to another.

Peter hardly moved his eyes from her, although he did not often address
her directly; Justin was quite obviously overcome by the unexpected
beauty of Anne's cousin; Anne herself, with an undefined pang, admitted
in her soul that Cherry was prettier than ever; and even Alix was
affected. With the lovely background of the forest, the shade of her
thin wide hat lightly shadowing her face, with the dew of her long
sleep and recent bath enhancing the childish purity of her skin, and
with her blue eyes full of content, Cherry was a picture of exquisite
youth and grace and charm. It was not the less winning because she
seemed genuinely unconscious of it to-day; perhaps before the girls and
Anne's precise little fledgling lawyer no self-conscious thought of
conquest had entered her head.

The dog had gone to her knee and laid his bronze mane against the white
ruffles, and while she listened and smiled, she idly fondled and petted
him with her childish, ringed hand.

"And the next experience is to be at Red Creek?" Justin asked,
delighted with this addition to the family circle and beaming about
upon everyone.

"Mr. Lloyd is there now," Cherry smiled. "Do you know Red Creek?--I'll
have to call you Justin, since you're going to be my cousin so soon,"
she interrupted herself to say shyly.

"No--I--er--I--er--don't!" Justin stammered.

Anne said vivaciously:

"Of course you're to call him Justin! And he's to call you Cherry,
too--those are my orders, Frenny, and don't you dare disobey!"

"But did you get onto the artful and engaging smile Justin gave
Cherry?" Alix giggled later to Peter. She and Peter were in the pantry,
deep in the manufacture of a certain sort of canape. "Why, he was all
in a heap over her!" continued Alix elegantly, as she sampled a small
piece of smeared toast with a severe and wrinkled brow. "Try a little
mustard in it," she suggested, adding confidentially, "You know Cherry
is really too pretty for any use! The rest of us can diet for
complexion or diet for figures, and this hat will be becoming or that
dress will always look well--but Cherry, why, she just knocks us all
galley-west! What's the use of struggling and brushing your hair and
worrying about your clothes, when a girl like Cherry will come along
and sit down and have everybody staring!"

"She is, of course, quite extraordinary!" Peter conceded as he punched
two small holes in the top of a tin of olive oil. The oil welled up
through the holes and he wiped his fingers on a corner of Alix's apron.

"It's just the difference," Alix said, "between being nice looking,
which half the women in the word are, and being a beauty. I remember
that when Cherry was only about ten I used to look at her and think
that there was something rather--well, rather arresting about her face.
It was such an aristocratic little face. I remember her in those old
bluejacket blouses--"

"Yes, I do, too!" Peter said quickly, straightening up from restoring
the vinegar demijohn to an obscure position in a lower cupboard.
"Well--These have to go in the oven now; I'll take them out. Aren't you
going to change for dinner? It's after six now!"

"Since you ask me, I'll see what frock Deshabille has laid out!" Alix
yawned, disappearing in the direction of the sitting room, where he
found her a few minutes later absorbed in a book.

The evening was cooler, with sudden wind and a promise of storm. They
grouped themselves about a fire in the old way; Anne and Justin sitting
close together on the settle, as Martin and Cherry had done a year ago.
Cherry sat next her father with her hand linked in his; neither hand
moved for a long, long time. Alix, sitting on the floor, with her lean
cheeks painted by the fire, played with the dog and rallied Peter about
some love affair, the details of which made him laugh vexedly in spite
of himself. Cherry watched them, a little puzzled at the familiarity of
Peter beside this fire; had he been so entirely one of the family a
year ago? She could almost envy him, feeling herself removed by so long
and strange a twelvemonth.

"Be that as it may, my dear," said Alix, "the fact remains that you
taught this Fenton woman to drive your car, didn't you? And you told
her that she was the best woman driver you ever knew, a better driver
even than Miss Strickland; didn't you?"

"I did not," Peter said, unmovedly smoking and watching the fire.

"Why, Peter, you did! She said you did!"

"Well, then, she said what is not true!"

"She distinctly told me," Alix remarked, "that dear Mr. Joyce had said
that she was the best woman driver he ever saw."

"Well, I may have said something like that," Peter growled, flushing.
Alix laughed exultingly. "I tell you I loathe her!" he added.

"Daddy, we have a lovely home!" Cherry said softly, her eyes moving
from the shabby books and the shabby rugs to Alix's piano shining in
the gloom of the far corner. It was all homelike and pleasant, and
somehow the atmosphere was newly inspiring to her; she had felt that
the talk at dinner, the old eager controversy about books and singers
and politics and science, was--well, not brilliant, perhaps, but worth
while. She was beginning to think Peter extremely clever and only
Alix's quick tongue a match for him, and to feel that her father knew
every book and had seen every worthwhile play in the world.

Martin, whose deep dissatisfaction with conditions at the "Emmy Younger
Mine" Cherry well knew, had entered into a correspondence some months
before relative to a position at another mine that seemed better to
him, and instead of coming down for a day or two at the time of Anne's
wedding, as Cherry had hoped he might, wrote her that the authorities
at the Red Creek plant had "jumped at him," and that he was closing up
all his affairs at the "Emmy Younger" and had arranged to ship all
their household effects direct to the new home. He knew nothing of Red
Creek, except that it was a small inland town in the San Joachim
region, but Cherry's delight at the thought of any alternative for the
"Emmy Younger" was a revelation to Alix. Martin told his wife
generously that he hoped she would stay with her father until the move
was accomplished, and Cherry, with a clear conscience, established
herself in her old room. She wrote constantly to her husband and often
spoke appreciatively of Mart's kindness.

Anne's marriage took place in mid-September. It was a much more formal
and elaborate affair than Cherry's had been, because, as Anne
explained, "Frenny's people have been so generous about giving him up,
you know. After all, he's the last of the Littles; all the others are
Folsoms and Randalls. And I want them to realize that he is marrying a
gentlewoman!"

The older Littles and all the Folsoms and Randalls came to the wedding,
self-respecting, thrifty people who were, for the most part, as Alix
summarized it, "buying little homes on the installment plan in
desirable residential districts of Oakland and Berkeley." There were
bright-faced school teachers, in dark plaid silk waists, and young
matrons in carefully planned colour schemes of brown and gray; and they
all told Alix and Cherry about the family, the members who were
daughters of the Revolution, and the members who belonged to the
Society of the Daughters of Officers of the Civil War.

Cherry and Alix went upstairs after the ceremony as Alix and Anne had
done a year ago, but there was deep relief and amusement in their mood
to-day, and it was with real pleasure in the closer intimacy that the
little group gathered about the fire that night.

After that life went on serenely, and it was only occasionally that the
girls were reminded that Cherry was a married woman with a husband
expecting her shortly to return to him. When she and Alix took part in
the village fairs and bazaars, Alix was still a little thrilled to see
their names in print, "Miss Strickland and her sister Mrs. Lloyd, who
is visiting her," but to Cherry all the romance seemed to have vanished
from her new estate. November passed, and Christmas came, and there was
some talk of Martin's joining them for Christmas. But he did not come;
he was extremely busy at the new mine and comfortable in a village
boarding-house.

It was in early March that Alix spoke to her father about it; spoke in
her casual and vague fashion, but gave him food for serious thought,
nevertheless.

"Dad," said Alix suddenly at the lunch table one day when Cherry
happened to be shopping in the city, "were you and Mother ever
separated when you were married?"

"No--" the doctor, remembering, shook his head. "Your mother never was
happy away from her home!"

"Not even to visit her own family?" persisted Alix.

"Not ever," he answered. "We always planned a long visit in the
East--but she never would go without me. She went to your Uncle
Vincent's house in Palo Alto once, but she came home the next
day--didn't feel comfortable away from home!"

"How long do you suppose Martin will let us have Cherry?" Alix asked.

Her father looked quickly at her and a troubled expression crossed his
face.

"The circumstances seem to make it wise to keep her here until he is
sure that this new position is the right one!" he said.

"If I know anything about Martin," Alix said, "no position is ever
going to be the right one for him. I mean," she added as her father
gave her an alarmed look, "I simply mean that he is that sort of man.
And it seems to me--odd, the way he and Cherry take their marriage! Now
when she got here, five months--six months ago," Alix went on as her
father watched her in close and distressed attention, "Cherry was
always talking about going back to Mart--every time he sent her money
she would say that she ought to keep it for a sudden summons. But she
doesn't do that now. You've been giving her her own allowance right
along, and she has settled down just as she was. A day or two ago
Martin sent her twenty dollars and she has gone into town to spend it
to-day--"

She hesitated, shrugged her shoulders.

"You think she ought to go back?" her father asked.

"No, I don't think so!" Alix answered, eagerly. "I don't think anything
about it. But--but IS that marriage? Is that really for better or for
worse? I mean," she interrupted herself hastily, "as time goes on it
will get harder and harder for her; there will seem to be less and less
reason for going! Mrs. Brown was talking to me about it yesterday, and
she asked in that catty, smiling way she has--"

"Trust the women to gossip!" the doctor said, impatiently.

"Well, nobody minds their gossip!" his daughter assured him. "And for
my part I think it's a shame that a girl can't come back home as simply
as that, if she wants to!" she added, boldly.

"Don't talk nonsense!" her father said, mildly. "You think," he added,
reluctantly, "that it wasn't a good thing for her, eh?"

"Well--" Alix began. "She doesn't seem like other married women," she
said, doubtfully. "And the only thing is, will she ever want to go
back, if she isn't rather--rather coerced. Martin is odd, you know; he
has a kind of stolid, stupid pride. He wrote her weeks ago and asked
her to come, and she wrote back that if he would find her a cottage,
she would; she couldn't go to his boarding-house, she hated boarding!
Martin answered that he would, some day, and she said to me, 'Oh, now
he's cross!' Now, mind you," Alix broke off vehemently, "I'd change the
entire institution of marriage, if it was me! I'd end all this--"

"Well, we won't go into that!" her father interrupted her, hastily, for
Alix had aired these views before and he was not in sympathy with them.
"And I guess you're right: the child is a woman now, with a woman's
responsibilities," he added. "And her place is with her husband.
They'll have to solve life together, to learn together. I'll speak to
Cherry!"

Alix, watching him walk away, thought that she had never seen Dad look
old before. She saw the shadow on his kind face all the rest of that
day.

It was only the next morning when he opened the question with Cherry.

It was a brilliant morning, with spring already in the air. Cherry, on
the porch steps, was reading a letter from Martin. Her father sat down
beside her. She had on one of her old gowns, and bathed in soft
sunlight, looked eighteen again. Emerald grass was already filming the
ground about the house; from under the deep rich brown of the forest
flooring spring had thrust a million tiny spears of green. The redwoods
wore plushy plumes of blue new foliage, and a wild lilac at the edge of
the clearing drifted like pale smoke against the dark woods. Everywhere
life was soaking and bursting after heavy rains; the very posts of the
garden fence were sprouting little feathery tips. The air was sweet and
pungent and damp and fresh, the sky high and blue, and across the
granite face of Tamalpais a last scarf of mist was floating.

"Well, what has Martin to say?" asked the doctor.

"Oh, he doesn't like it much!" Cherry said, making a little face. "He
describes the village as perfectly hopeless. He's moved into the little
house in E Street, and gotten two stoves up."

"And when does he want his girl?" her father pursued.

"He doesn't say," Cherry answered, innocently. "I think he is really
happier to have me here, where he knows I am well off!" she said. "I
know I am," she ended after a moment's thought.

Her father was conscious of a pang; he had not even formed the thought
in his own mind that Cherry was unhappy. He was as trusting and as
innocent as his daughters in many ways; he shrank from the unwelcome
facts of life. His own childhood had been hard and disciplinary, and at
Cherry's age he had been concerned only with realities, with the need
of food and clothes and shelter. That a life could be spoiled simply by
contact with an unsympathetic personality was incomprehensible to him.
The child, he told himself, had a good husband, a home and health, and
undeveloped resources within herself. It was puzzling and painful to
him to realize that there was needed something more--and that that
something was lacking. He felt a sudden anger at Martin; why wasn't
Martin managing this affair!

"Mart doesn't mention any time!" he mused.

"Thanks to you!" Cherry said, dimpling mischievously. "He wrote quite
firmly, just before Christmas," she added, "but I told him that Dad had
been such an angel and liked so much to have me here--" And Cherry's
smile was full of childish triumph.

"My dear," her father said, spurred to sudden courage by a realization
that the matter might easily become serious, "you mustn't abuse his
generosity. Suppose you write that you'll join him--this is
March--suppose you say the first of April?"

Cherry flushed and looked down. Her lips trembled. There was a moment
of unhappy silence.

"Very well, Dad," she said in a low voice. A second later she had
jumped to her feet and vanished in the house. Her father roamed the
woods in wretched misgivings, coming in at lunch time to find her in
her place, smiling, but traces of tears about her lovely eyes.

Nothing more was said for a day or two, and then Cherry read aloud to
the family an affectionate letter in which Martin said that everything
would be ready for her whenever she came now.




CHAPTER VII


The last day of March and of Cherry's visit broke clear and blue, and
with it spring seemed to have come on a rush of perfume and green
beauty. Days had been soft and warm before; this day was hot, and
flushed with colour and splendour. There were iris in the dewy grass
under the oaks, but in the sunshine every trace of winter's damp had
disappeared. Larks whirled up from the fields, and the bridal-wreath
and syringa bushes were mounds of creamy bloom.

Alix and Cherry washed each other's hair in the old fashion, and came
trailing down with towels and combs to the garden. The doctor joined
them in the midst of their tossing and spreading, and sat smoking
peacefully on the porch steps.

"Oh, heavens, how I love this sort of weather!" Alix exclaimed,
flinging her brown mane backward, her tall figure slender in a faded
kimono. She sat down crosswise on her chair, locked her arms about its
back, dropped her face on them, and yawned luxuriously. "Dad and
Peter," she went on, suddenly sitting erect, "will get all this nice
clean hair full of cigar smoke to-night, so what's the use, anyway?"

"To-night's the night we go to Peter?" Cherry stated rather than asked.
"Do you remember," she glanced at her father, who was reading his
paper, "do you remember when Dad always used to scold us for being rude
to Peter?"

"Well, I'd rather go to Peter's for dinner than anywhere else I ever
go!" Alix remarked, dreamily. "Seriously, I mean it!" she repeated as
Cherry looked at her in amused surprise. "In the first place, I love
his bungalow--tiny as it is, it has the whole of a little canyon to
itself, and the prettiest view in the valley, I think. And then I love
the messy sitting room, with all the books and music, and I love the
way Peter entertains. I wish," she added, simply, "that I liked Peter
half as well as I do his house!"

"Peter's a dear!" Cherry contended.

"Oh, I know he is!" Alix said, quickly. "Peter's always been a dear, of
course. But I mean in a special sense--" finished Alix with an entirely
unembarrassed grin.

Cherry, through a glittering cloud of hair, looked at her steadily.
Suddenly she gave an odd laugh.

"Do you know I never thought of Peter like that?" she said.

Alix nodded with a cautious look at her father who was out of hearing.

"No, nor I! We've always taken him rather for granted," she admitted.
"Only I've been rather wishing, lately, that Peter wasn't such an
unflattering, big-brotherish, every-day-neighbour sort of person."

Still Cherry regarded her steadily with an awakening look in her eyes.

"Why lately?" she asked.

"Because," said Alix, briskly and unromantically, "I think Peter would
like me to--well, to stop taking him for granted!"

"But Peter's lame--" Cherry submitted, doubtfully.

"You can't call a shortness left from a broken leg LAME!" Alix
protested. "Peter isn't brawny, but he's never been ill. And he's not a
child. He's thirty-seven. And I imagine he's awfully lonely. And then I
imagine it would please Dad--" "Dad has always been ridiculously fond
of him," Cherry said, thoughtfully. Peter--possibly in love with Alix!
She had never even suspected it. Peter's attitude toward them all had
been more paternal than anything else. Cherry and her sister could not
remember life without Peter, but he had always been Dad's friend,
rather than theirs. He had rebuked them; he had patiently asked them
not to chatter so; he had criticized their grammar and their clothes
and their friends.

Peter and Alix. Well, there was something rather pleasant in the
thought after all, if Alix didn't mind his ugliness and thinness.
Cherry thought about it all day. She had had no thought of money a year
or two ago; but she was more experienced now. And Peter was rich.

Ordinarily she would have said that she was not going to change for
Peter's dinner; but this afternoon, without mentioning the fact, she
quietly got into one of her prettiest dresses; a dress that had been
made in the long-ago excitement of trousseau days. Peter as a rather
autocratic and critical neighbour was one thing; as a possible
brother-in-law he was another.

She came downstairs to find her father waiting, and they walked away
through the woods together. Alix had already gone up to Peter's house
to play tennis. They walked slowly through the lovely aisles of the
trees, crossing a road or two, climbing steadily upward under great
redwoods. The forest was thinning with oaks and madrone trees, and they
found the sunlight again high on the crest of the ridge before a turn
of the trail brought them in view of Peter's bungalow. It was a shabby
little place, all porch and slope of rough brown roof, set in a
wilderness of wild flowers and overlooking long descending slopes of
hillside that stretched far away to the very bay and marshes at the
ocean mouth.

To-night the spring sunshine streamed across it with broad shadows, the
mountains' rough crest stood against a wide expanse of sunset sky.
Cherry's skirt brushed the gold dust from masses and masses of
buttercups. The tennis was over, but just over; Peter and Alix were
sitting, still panting, on the rail of the wide, open porch, and
shouted as the others came up.

"You missed doubles!" called Alix. "The grandest we ever did! Doubles
with the Thompsons and three sets straight to us--six-two, six-two, and
six-two again! They've gone. Oh, heavens, I never had such tennis. Oh,
Peter, when you stood there at the net and just curved your hand like a
cup"--Alix gave an enthusiastic imitation--"and over she went, and game
and set!"

Cherry, sinking white and frilly into a chair, smiled indulgently. The
walk had given her a wild-rose colour, and even Alix was struck with
her extraordinary beauty. Alix had wheeled about on the rail to face
the porch, and Peter had gotten to his feet and was hospitably pushing
basket chairs about. Now he gave Alix a critical look.

"You're disgracefully dirty!" he said, fraternally.

"I know it," she answered, calmly. "Have I time to tub?"

"All the time in the world!" he answered.

"Are any clothes of mine here?" further demanded Alix, rising lazily.

"Yes, there's a blouse. It's in the linen closet; ask Kow for it or get
it yourself when you get your towels. You left it the day you changed
here after we all climbed the mountain. I hope you people are going to
get enough to eat," Peter added, flinging himself into a chair beside
Cherry.

"He's been cooking it since breakfast!" Alix remarked, departing. Peter
laughed guiltily, and Cherry, too. It was only an exaggeration of the
simple truth. He loved to cook, and his meals were famous.

"It's very pleasant to me to have Alix so much at home here," Cherry
said, when Alix was gone, and the doctor wandering happily about the
garden. "I don't know what we'd do if any one ever usurped our places
here!"

She had said it deliberately; the fascination of her recent discovery
was too strong to resist. The man flushed suddenly. For a full minute
he did not speak, and Cherry was surprised to find herself a little
thrilled and even frightened by his silence.

"What put that into your head?" he asked, presently, smoking with his
eyes fixed upon the valley far below.

"Just--being here," she answered. And as he glanced over his shoulder
he met her smile.

"You've been here a thousand times without ever paying me a
compliment!" he reminded her.

Cherry considered this, her brows drawn a trifle together.

"Perhaps," she offered, presently, "it's because there are so many
changes, Peter; my marriage, Anne's--everything different! It just came
to me that it is nice to have this always the same."

"Perhaps Alix will come up here and help keep it so some day," the man
said, deliberately. Cherry's look of elaborate surprise and pleasure
died before his serious glance. She was silent for a moment.

"Why don't you ask her?" she said in a low, thoughtful tone, trembling,
eager to preserve his mood without a false note.

"I have," he answered simply. Cherry's heart jumped with a sudden
unexpected emotion. What was it? Not pleasure, not all surprise--surely
there could be no jealousy mixed with her feeling for Peter's plans?
But she was dazed with the rush of feeling; hurt in some fashion she
could not stop to dissect now. Only this morning she had felt that
Peter was not good enough for Alix; now, suddenly, he began to seem
admirable and dear and unlike everybody else--

"And she said no?" she stammered in confusion.

"She said no. Or, at least, I intimated that I was a lonely old
affectionate man with this and that to offer, and she intimated that
that wasn't enough. It was all--" he laughed--"It was all extremely
sketchy!"

"Peter, but what does she want?" There was actual sisterly indignation
in Cherry's tone.

"Oh, Alix is quite right!" he answered, lightly. "I ought to have
said--I ought to explain--that I had told her, only a few days
previously, that I had always loved somebody else!"

"Oh-h-h!" Cherry was enlightened. She visualized an affair in the last
years of the old century for Peter.

"Oh, and--and she didn't love you?" Cherry asked.

"The lady? She was unfortunately married before I had a chance to ask
her," said Peter.

"Oh-h-h!" Cherry said again, impressed, "and you'll never get over it?"
she asked, timidly. "Peter, I never knew that!" she added as he was
silent. "Does--does Dad know?"

"Nobody knows but Alix, and she only knows the bare facts," he assured
her.

"Oh!" Cherry could think of nothing to add to the sympathetic little
monosyllable. Twilight was reaching even the hilltop, the canyons were
rilling with violet shadows; the sweet, pungent odour of the first dew,
falling on warm dust, crept across the garden.

"Finished with the shower!" shrieked Alix from the warm darkness inside
the doorway. "Hurry up, Peter, something smells utterly grand!"

"That's the chicken thing!" Peter shouted back, springing up to
disappear in the direction of the bathroom. Cherry sat on, silent,
wrapped still in the new spell of the pleasant voice, the strangely
appealing and yet masterful personality.

The dinner straggled as all Peter's dinners did; Alix mixed a
salad-dressing; Peter himself flashed in and out of the tiny, hot
kitchen a hundred times. Kow, in immaculate linen, came back and forth
in leisurely table-setting. Suddenly everything was ready; the crisp,
smoking-hot French loaf, the big, brown jar of bubbling and odorous
chicken, the lettuce curled in its bowl, the long-necked bottles in
their straw cases, and cheeses and crackers and olives and figs and
tiny fish in oil and marrons in fluted paper that were a part of all
Peter's dinners.

After dinner they watched the moon rise, until Alix drifted in to the
piano and Peter followed her, and the others came in, too, to sit
beside the fire. As usual it was midnight before any one thought of
ending one of Peter's evenings.

And all through the pleasant, quiet hours, and when he bundled them up
in his own big loose coats to drive them home, Cherry was thinking of
him in this new light; Peter loving a woman, and denied. The knowledge
seemed to fling a strange glamour about him; she saw new charm in him,
or perhaps, as she told herself, she saw for the first time how
charming he really was. His speech seemed actually the pleasanter for
the stammer at which they had all laughed years ago; the slight limp
lent its own touch of individuality, and the man's blunt criticisms of
books and music, politics and people, were softened by his humour, his
genuine humility, and his eager hospitality.

Next day she took occasion to mention Peter and his affairs to Alix.
Alix turned fiery red, but laughed hardily.

"If he considers that an offer, he can consider it a refusal, I guess,"
she said, boyishly embarrassed. "I like him--I'm crazy about him. But I
don't want any party in ringlets and crinolines to come floating from
the dead past over my child's innocent cradle--"

"Alix, you're awful!" Cherry laughed. "You couldn't talk that way if
you loved him!"

"What way?" Alix demanded.

"Oh, about his--well, his children!"

"I should think that would be just the proof that I do love him," Alix
persisted idly in her musical, mischievous voice. "I certainly wouldn't
want to talk of the children of a man I DIDN'T--"

"Oh, Alix, don't!" Cherry protested. "Anyway, you know better."

Alix laughed.

"I suppose I do. I suppose I ought to be a mass of blushes. The truth
is, I like kids, and I don't like husbands--" Alix confessed, with
engaging candour.

"You don't know anything about husbands!" Cherry laughed.

"I know lots of men I'd like to go off with for a few months," Alix
pursued. "But then I'd like to come home again! I don't see why that
isn't perfectly reasonable--"

"Well, it's not!" Cherry declared almost crossly. "That isn't marriage.
You belong where your husband is, and you--you are always glad to be
with him--"

"But suppose you get tired of him, like a job or a boarding-house, or
any of your other friends?" Alix persisted idly.

"Well, you aren't supposed to!" Cherry said, feebly. Alix let her have
the last word; it was only due to her superior experience, she thought
crossly. But half an hour later, lying wakeful, and thinking that she
would miss dear old Cherry to-morrow, she fancied she heard something
like a sob from Cherry's bed, and her whole heart softened with
sympathy for her sister.

They came downstairs together the next day in mid-afternoon, both
hatted and wrapped for the trip, for Peter was to take Cherry as far as
Sausalito in the car, and Martin by a fortunate chance was to meet them
there at the ferryboat for San Francisco. Mill Valley was not more than
an hour's ride from the ferry. Alix was to drive down and return with
Peter. Cherry said good-bye to her father in the porch; she seemed more
of a puzzled child than ever.

"I've had a wonderful visit, Dad--" she began bravely. Suddenly the
tears came. She buried her face against her father's shabby old office
coat and his arms went about her. Alix laughed awkwardly, and Peter
shut his teeth. Anne, who had very properly come over to say good-bye
to her cousin, got in the back seat of the car and Alix took the seat
beside her.

"Take a picture of Peter and me with the suitcases!" she said. "We must
look so domestic!"

"Get in here, Cherry," Peter said, opening the door of the seat beside
his own. "Doctor, we'll be back in about an hour--"

"Without Cherry!" her father said with a rueful smile.

"Without Cherry!" Peter echoed, looking at her gravely.

It was then that Cherry saw in Peter's expression something that she
did not forget for many, many months--never quite forgot. He wore a
rough tramping costume to-day, a Sunday, and he was halfway up the
porch steps, ready to carry bags to the waiting motor car. His eyes
were fixed upon her with something so yearning, so loving, so troubled
in their gaze that a thrill went through Cherry from head to foot. He
instantly averted his look, turned to the car, fumbled with the gears;
they were off. He was to drive them all the way to Sausalito; Alix
commented joyously upon the beauty of the day.

Cherry, tied trimly into a hat that was all big daisies, was silent for
a while. But when Alix and Anne commenced an interested conversation in
the back seat, she suddenly said regretfully:

"Oh, I hate to go away this time! I mind it more even than the first
time!"

Peter, edging smoothly about a wide blue puddle, nodded
sympathetically, but did not answer.

"I envy Alix--" Cherry said in idle mischief. She knew that the subject
was not a safe one, but was irresistibly impelled to pursue it.

"Alix?" said Peter, after a silence long enough to make her feel
ashamed of herself.

"Yes. Her young man lives in Mill Valley, right near home!" elucidated
Cherry.

"Am I Alix's young man?" he asked, amused.

"Well, aren't you?"

"I don't know. I've never been any one's young man," said Peter.

"Whoever the woman who treated you meanly is--I hate her!" Cherry began
again. "Unless," she added, "unless she was very young, and you never
told her!"

This time he did not answer at all, and they spun along in utter
silence. But when they were nearing Sausalito, Cherry said almost
timidly:

"I think perhaps it would make her happy--and proud, to know that you
admired her, Peter. I don't know who she is, of course, but almost any
woman would feel that. This visit, somehow, has made me feel as if you
and I had really begun a new friendship on our own account, not just
the old friendship. And I shall often think of that talk we had a week
ago, and-think of you, too. N-n-next time you fall in love I hope you
will be luckier!"

Silence. But he gave her his quick, friendly smile. Cherry dared not
speak again.

"Last stop--all out!" Alix exclaimed. "You get tickets, Peter. Hurray,
there's Martin!"

Unexpectedly Martin's big figure came toward them from the ferry gate.
Some ore from the mine had to be assayed in San Francisco, and he had
volunteered to make the trip so that he might meet his wife and bring
her back with him to Red Creek. Time hanging on his hands in the city,
he had crossed the bay for the pleasure of the return trip with Cherry.
He met them beamingly. There was a little confusion of greeting and
good-byes. Alix and Peter watched the others at the railing until the
ferryboat turned. Martin smiled over Anne's head; Cherry, both little
white-gloved hands on the rail, blue eyes and a glint of bright hair
showing under the daisies on her hat, her small figure enveloped in a
big loose coat, looked as if she would like to cry again.

"It must be fun to be married, and go off to strange places with your
beau!" Alix decided. "I'm hungry, Peter; let's go over there and treat
ourselves to fried oysters!"

"Let's go home," he said, unsympathetically. "I'm not hungry."

"Oh, VERY well!" Alix agreed, airily, jumping into the seat beside him.
"Though what has given you a grouch I really am at a loss to imagine!"
she added under her breath.

"I don't hear you!" shouted Peter, who was suddenly rushing the engine.

"You weren't intended to!" she shouted back. And until they were
halfway home, and Alix laughed out in sudden shame and good-nature not
another word was spoken. The bright weather had changed suddenly, and a
wet spring cloud was spreading over the sky.

"Love me, Peter?" Alix asked, suddenly.

"Not always!" he answered, briefly and sincerely. Fog was creeping over
the marshes, the air was full of damp chill. A memory of the
coat-enveloped figure and the blue eyes that smiled wistfully under a
daisied hat was wringing his heart.

"Listen," began Alix again. "Let's stop for Dad, it's going to pour.
And let's go up to your house to eat?"

Silence.

"We can play duets all evening!" Alix added, temptingly.

"Little and Anne coming back?" Peter asked, unwillingly.

"No; they're dining with the Quelquechoses--those bright-faced,
freckled cousins of his," Alix answered.

"I don't know that I've got anything up there to eat!" Peter said,
gloomily.

"Ooo--say!" Alix said, brightening suddenly with her incorrigible
childishness of expression. "Kow's got eggs and cream, hasn't he? I'll
make that new thing I was telling you about--it's delicious. Oh, and an
onion--" she broke off in concern.

"He has an onion," Peter admitted. "What dish?" he asked, interested in
spite of himself, as Alix fell into a rapturous reverie.

"Well, you fry a chopped onion," Alix began, "and then you have a lot
of hard-boiled eggs--" In another moment they were deep in culinary
details.




CHAPTER VIII


Martin's work was in the Contra Costa Valley, and he and Cherry had a
small house in Red Creek, the only town of any size near the mine. Red
Creek was in a fruit-farming and dairy region and looked its prettiest
on the spring evening when Cherry saw it first. The locusts were in
leaf and ready to bloom, and the first fruit blossoms were scattered in
snowy whiteness up and down the valley.

Her little house was a cottage with a porch running across the front
where windows looked out from the sitting room and the front bedroom.
Back of these rooms were a dark little bathroom that connected the
front bedroom with another smaller bedroom, a little dining room and a
kitchen. Almost all the houses in Red Creek were duplicates, except in
minor particulars, of this house, but this particular specimen was
older than some of the others and showed signs of hard usage. The
kitchen floor was chipped and stained, and the bathroom basin was
plugged with putty; there were odd bottles partly full of shoe polish
and ink and vinegar, here and there; and on the shelves of the
triangular closet in the dining room were cut and folded pieces of
spotted white paper.

Martin, man-fashion, had merely camped in kitchen and bedroom while
awaiting his wife; but Cherry buttoned on her crisp little apron on the
first morning after her arrival, and attacked the accumulated dishes in
the sink, and the scattered shirts and collars bravely. It was a cold,
raw morning, and she went to and fro briskly, burning rubbish in the
airtight stove in the sitting room, and keeping a good wood fire going
in the kitchen, and feeling housewifely and efficient as she did so.

After a lunch for which she was praised and applauded in something of
the old honeymoon way, she walked to market, passing blocks of other
little houses like her own, with bare dooryards where nipped
chrysanthemums dangled on poles, and where play wagons, puddles of
water, and picking chickens alternated regularly. Other marketing women
looked at Cherry with the quickly averted look that is only given to
beauty; but the men in the shops wrote down the new name and address
with especial zeal and amiability. She remembered the old necessities,
bacon and lard and sugar and matches; she recovered the kitchen clock
from its wrapping of newspaper, and wound it, and set it on the sink
shelf; she was busy with a hundred improvements and cares, and was
almost too tired, when Martin came home to dinner, to sit up and share
it with him.

It was warm in the dining room and Cherry yawned over her dessert, and
rose stiff and aching to return to the kitchen with plates and silver,
glasses and food, to shake the tablecloth, to pile and wash and wipe
and put away the china, to brush the floor and the stove, and do the
last wiping and wringing, and to turn out the gas, and go in to her
chair beside the airtight stove.

Martin handed her half his paper and Cherry took it, realizing with
cheerful indifference that there was a streak of soot on one cuff, and
that her hands were affected by grease and hot water. She read jokes
and recipes and answers to correspondents, and small editorial fillers
as to the number of nutmegs consumed in China yearly, and the name and
circumstances of the oldest living man in England. A new novel was in
her bedroom, but she was too comfortable and too tired to go get it,
and at ten she rose yawning and stumbling, and went to bed. Breakfast
must be on the table at half-past seven, for Martin left for the mine
at eight, and she had had a hard day.

For a few weeks the novelty lasted and Cherry was enthusiastic about
everything. She looked out across her dishpan at green fields and the
beginning of the farms; she saw the lilacs burst into fragrant plumes
on the bare branches of her dooryard trees; spring flushed the whole
world with loveliness, and she was young, and healthy, and too busy to
be homesick.

Martin left the house at eight and was usually at home at five. He
would sometimes come into her kitchen while she finished dinner, and
tell her about the day, and then suggested that they go to the
"pictures" at night. But although Cherry and Alix often had coaxed
their father into this dissipation in Mill Valley, it was different
there, she found. That was a small colony of city people, the theatre
was small, and the films carefully selected. One sat with one's
neighbours and friends. But here in Red Creek the theatre was a
draughty barn, and the farm workers, big men odorous of warm, acid
perspiration, pushed in laughing and noisy; the films were of a
different character, too, and advertised by frightful coloured posters
at the doors. Martin himself did not like them; indeed, he and Cherry
found little to like in either the people or the town.

It was a typical railroad town of California. It was flat, dusty, all
its buildings of wood. There were some two thousand souls in Red Creek;
two or three stores, a bakery from which the crude odour of baking
bread burst every night; saloons, warehouses, a smithy, a butcher shop
open only two days a week, a Chinese laundry from which opium-tainted
steam issued all day and all night; cattle sheds, pepper trees, wheat
barns, and a hotel of raw pine, with a narrow bedroom represented by
every one of the forty narrow windows in its upper stories, and a lower
floor decorated with spittoons. Back of the crowded main street was
another street, beside which Main Street's muddy ugliness was
beautiful. Here was another saloon, and rooms above it, and several
disreputable cottages about which Cherry sometimes saw odd-looking
women.

Not everyone in Red Creek was poor, by any means. It was a district
bursting with prosperity; all summer long wheat and fruit and butter
and beef poured through it out into the world. Down the road a mile or
two, and back toward the far hills, were comfortable ranches where
trees planted fifty years before had grown to mammoth proportions, and
where the women of the family cultivated gardens. Every family had pigs
and cattle and fine horses, and mud-spattered motor cars were familiar
sights in Red Creek's streets.

Cherry used to wonder why anybody who could live elsewhere lived here.
When some of the ranch girls told her that they always did their
shopping in San Francisco, she marvelled that they could reconcile
themselves to come home.

The days went on and on, each bringing its round of dishes, beds,
sweeping, marketing, folding and unfolding tablecloths, going back and
forth between kitchen and dining room. Martin's breakfast was either
promptly served and well cooked, in which case Martin was silently
satisfied, or it was late and a failure, when he was very articulately
disgusted; in either case Cherry was left to clear and wash and plan
for another meal in four hours more. She soaked fruit, beat up cake,
chopped boxes into kindlings, heated a kettle of water and another
kettle of water, dragged sheets from the bed only to replace them,
filled dishes with food only to find them empty and ready to wash again.

"I get sick of it!" she told Martin.

"Well, Lord!" he exclaimed. "Don't you think everybody does? Don't I
get sick of my work? You ought to have the responsibility of it all for
a while!"

His tone was humorously reproving rather than unkind. But such a speech
would fill Cherry's eyes with tears, and cause her to go about the
house all morning with a heavy heart.

She would find herself looking thoughtfully at Martin in these days,
studying him as if he were an utter stranger. It bewildered her to feel
that he actually was no more than that, after two years of marriage.
She not only did not know him, but she had a baffled sense that the
very nearness of their union prevented her from seeing him fairly. She
knew that she did him injustice in her thoughts.

It MUST be injustice, decided Cherry. For Martin seemed to her less
clever, less just, less intelligent, and less generous than the average
man of her acquaintance. And yet he did not seem to impress other
people in the way he impressed her.

He was extraordinarily healthy, and had small sympathy for illness,
weakness, for the unfortunate, and the complaining. He was scrupulously
clean, and Cherry added that to his credit, although the necessity of
seeing that Martin's bath, Martin's shaving water, and Martin's clean
linen were ready complicated her duties somewhat. He was not interested
in the affairs of the day; politics, reforms, world movements generally
found him indifferent, but he would occasionally favour his wife with a
sudden opinion as to China or intensive farming or Lloyd's shipping.
She knew when he did this that he was quoting. He whistled over his
dressing, read the paper at breakfast, and was gone. At noon he rushed
in, always late, devoured his lunch appreciatively, and was gone again.
At night he was usually tired, inclined to quarrel about small matters,
inclined to disapprove of the new positions of the bedroom furniture,
or the way Cherry's hair was dressed.

He loved to play poker and was hospitable to a certain extent. He would
whistle and joke over the preparations for a rarebit after a game, and
would willingly walk five blocks for beer if Cherry had forgotten to
get it. On Sunday he liked to see her prettily gowned; now and then
they motored with his friends from the mine; more often walked, ate a
hearty chicken dinner, and went to a cold supper in the neighbourhood,
with "Five Hundred" to follow. At ten their hostess would flutter into
her kitchen; there would be lemonade and beer and rich layer cake. Then
the men would begin to match poker hands, and the women to discuss
babies in low tones.

Cherry never saw her husband so animated or so interested as when men
he had known before chanced to drift into town, mining men from Nevada
or from El Nido, or men he had known in college. They would discuss
personalities, would shout over recollected good times, would slap each
other on the back and laugh tirelessly.

She thought him an extremely difficult man to live with, and was
angered when her hints to this effect led him to remark that she was
the "limit." They had a serious quarrel one day, when he told her that
she was the most selfish and spoiled woman he had ever known. He called
her attention to the other women of the town, busy, contented women,
sending children off to school, settling babies down for naps in sunny
dooryards, cooking and laughing and hurrying to and fro.

"Yes, and look at them!" Cherry said with ready tears. "Shabby, thin,
tired all the time!"

"The trouble with you is," Martin said, departing, "you've been told
that you're pretty and sweet all your life--and you're SPOILED! You are
pretty, yes--" he added, more mildly. "But, by George, you sulk so
much, and you crab so much, that I'm darned if I see it any more! All I
see is trouble!"

With this he left her. Left her to a burst of angry tears, at first,
when she dropped her lovely little head on the blue gingham of her
apron sleeve and cried bitterly.

The kettle began to sing on the stove, a bee came in and wandered about
the hot kitchen; the grocer knocked, and Cherry let the big lout of a
boy stare at her red eyes uncaring.

Then she went swiftly into the bedroom and began to pack and change.
She'd SHOW Martin Lloyd--she'd SHOW Martin Lloyd! She was going
straight to Dad--she'd take the--take the--

She frowned. She had missed the nine o'clock train; she must wait for
the train at half-past two. Wait where? Well, she could only wait here.
Very well, she would wait here. She would not get Martin any lunch, and
when he raged she would explain.

She finished her packing and put the house in order. Then, in
unaccustomed mid-morning leisure, she sank into a deep rocker, and
began to read. Quiet and shade and order reigned in the little house.
Outside in the shaded street the children went shouting home again; a
fishman's horn sounded.

Steps came bounding up to Cherry's door; her heart began to beat; a
knock sounded. She got to her feet, puzzled; Martin did not knock.

It was Joe Robinson, his closest friend at the mine. His handsome,
big-featured face was full of concern.

"Say, listen, Mrs. Lloyd; Mart can't get home to dinner," said Joe. "He
don't feel extra well--he was in the engine room and he kinder--he
kinder--"

"Fainted?" Cherry asked, sharply, turning a little pale.

"Well, kinder. Lawson made him lay down," Joe said. "And he's coming
home when the wagon comes down, at three o'clock. He says to tell you
he's fine!"

"Oh, thank you, Joe!" Cherry said. She shut the door, feeling weak and
frightened. She flew to unpack her bag, hung up her hat and coat,
darkened the bedroom and turned down the bed; waited anxiously for
Mart's return. Mrs. Turner came in with the baby, a gentle, tired
woman, with a face always radiant with joy. Mrs. Turner had seven
children, and had once told Cherry that she had never slept a night
through since the first year of her marriage. She never changed a
baby's gown or rolled a batch of cookies without a deep and genuine
love for the task; she could not unbutton the twisted collar from a
son's small neck without drawing his freckled cheek to her hungry lips
for a kiss, or ask one of her black-headed, bright-eyed daughters to
hang up a dish towel without adding: "You're a darling help to your
mother!"

The Turners lived next door to the Lloyds, in a shabby two-story house,
and though Cherry and her neighbour spoke a different language, they
had grown fond of each other. Cherry had sometimes timidly touched upon
the matter that was always troubling her, with the older woman. But
Mrs. Turner had little to say regarding her feeling for the lean,
silent, somewhat unsuccessful man who was the head of her crowded
household. She seemed to take it for granted that he would sometimes be
unreasonable.

"Papa gets so mad if anything gets burned!" she would say, with her
gentle laugh. And once she added the information that her husband's
mother had been a wonderful manager. "Men are that way!" was her
comment upon the difficulties of other wives. But once, when there was
a wedding near by, Cherry, with others in the church, saw the tears in
Mrs. Turner's eyes as she watched the bride. "Poor little innocent
thing!" she had whispered with a tremulous smile.

She was deeply concerned over the news from Martin, and when Cherry had
met his limp form at the front door, and had whisked him into a cool
bed, and put chopped ice on the aching forehead, and gotten him,
grateful and penitent, off to sleep, her neighbour came over again to
whisper in the kitchen.

"He's all right," Cherry smiled. "He was so glad to get to bed, and so
appreciative!" she added in a motherly tone.

"You look as if you hadn't a thing in the world to do!" the older
housekeeper commented, glancing about the neat, quiet kitchen.

"I believe I like sick nursing!" Cherry smiled back.

For a day or two Martin stayed in bed and Cherry spoiled and petted
him, and was praised and thanked for every step she took. After that
they took a little trip into the mountains near by, and Cherry sent
Alix postcards that made her sister feel almost a pang of envy.

But then the routine began again, and the fearful heat of midsummer
came, too. Red Creek baked in a smother of dusty heat, the trees in the
dry orchards, beside the dry roads, dropped circles of hot shadow on
the clodded, rough earth. Farms dozed under shimmering lines of
dazzling air, and in the village, from ten o'clock until the afternoon
began to wane, there was no stir. Flies buzzed and settled on screen
doors, the creek shrunk away between crumbling rocky banks, the butcher
closed his shop, and milk soured in the bottles.

The Turners, and some other families, always camped together in the
mountains during this season, and they were off when school closed, in
an enviable state of ecstasy and anticipation. Cherry had planned to
join them, but an experimental week-end was enough. The camp was in the
cool woods, truly, but it was disorderly, swarming with children, the
tents were small and hot, the whole settlement laughed and rioted and
surged to and fro in a manner utterly foreign to her. She returned, to
tell Martin that it was "horribly common," and weather the rest of the
summer in Red Creek.

"Mrs. Turner is the only woman that I can stand," said Cherry, "and she
was always cooking, in an awful cooking shed, masses and masses of
macaroni and stewed plums and biscuits--and all of them laughing and
saying, 'Girlie, I guess you've got a hollow leg!' Dearie, I couldn't
eat any more without busting!' And sitting round that plank table--"

Martin shouted with laughter at her, but he sympathized. He had never
cared particularly for the Turners; was perfectly willing to keep the
friendship within bounds.

He sympathized as little with another friendship she made, some months
later, with the wife of a young engineer who had recently come to the
mine. Pauline Runyon was a few years older than her husband, a
handsome, thin, intense woman, who did everything in an entirely
individual way. She took one of the new little bungalows that were
being erected in Red Creek "Park," and furnished it richly and
inappropriately, and established a tea table and a samovar beside the
open fireplace. Cherry began to like better than anything else in the
world the hours she spent with Pauline. She would have liked to go
every day, and every day argued and debated the propriety of doing so,
in her heart.

Not since the days of her engagement to Martin, and then only on a few
occasions, had she felt the thrill that she experienced now, when
Pauline, with her dark eyes and her frilly parasol, wandered in the
kitchen door, to sit laughing and talking for a few minutes, or when
she herself dressed and crossed the village, and went up past the
packing plant and the storage barns to the two small cement gate posts
and the length of rusty chain that marked the entrance to Red Creek
"Park." Then there would be tea, poetry, talk, and the flattery that
Pauline quite deliberately applied to Cherry, and the flattery that
Cherry all unconsciously lavished on her friend in return.

Pauline read Browning, Francis Thompson, and Pater, and introduced
Cherry to new worlds of thought. She talked to Cherry of New York,
which she loved, and of the men and women she had met there. She
sometimes sighed and pushed the bright hair back from Cherry's young
and innocent and discontented little face, and said, tenderly, "On the
stage, my dear--anywhere, everywhere, you would be a furore!"

And thinking, in the quiet evenings--for Martin's work kept him later
and later at the mine--Cherry came to see that her marriage had been a
great mistake. She had not been ready for marriage. She would sit on
the back steps, as the evenings grew cooler, and watch the exquisite
twilight fade, and the sorrow and beauty of life would wring her heart.

Darkness came, the Turner children shrieked, laughed, clattered dishes,
and were silent. Cherry would sit on, her arms wrapped in her apron,
her eyes staring into the young night. In the darkness she could only
see the great shadows that were the Adams' windmill, and the old Brown
barn, and the Cutters' house down the back road. The dry earth seemed
awake at night, stretching itself, under brown sods, for a great breath
of relief in the merciful coolness. Cherry could smell grapes, and
smell the pleasant wetness of the dust where the late watering cart had
passed by, after sunset. The roads were too hot for watering all day
long, and this sweet, wet odour only came with the night.

A dream of ease and adoration and beauty came to her. She did not
visualize any special place, any special gown or hour or person. But
she saw her beauty fittingly environed; she saw cool rooms, darkened
against this blazing midsummer glare; heard ice clinking against glass;
the footsteps of attentive maids; the sound of cultivated voices, of
music and laughter. She had had these dreams before, but they were
becoming habitual now. She was so tired--so sick--so bored with her
real life; it was becoming increasingly harder and harder for her to
live with Martin; to endure and to struggle against the pricks. She was
always in a suppressed state of wanting to break out, to shout at him
brazenly, "I don't care if your coffee is weak! I like it weak! I don't
care if you don't like my hat--I do! Stop talking about yourself!"

Various little mannerisms of his began seriously to annoy her; a rather
grave symptom, had Cherry but known it. He danced his big fingers on
the handle of the sugar spoon at breakfast, sifting the sugar over his
cereal; she had to turn her eyes resolutely away from the sight. He
blew his nose, folded his handkerchief, and then brushed his nose with
it firmly left and right; she hated the little performance that was
never altered. He had a certain mental slowness, would blink at her
politely and patiently when she flashed plans or hopes at him: "I don't
follow you, my dear!" This made her frantic.

She was twenty, undisciplined and exacting. She had no reserves within
herself to which she could turn. Bad things were hopelessly bad with
Cherry, her despairs were the dark and tearful despairs of girlhood,
prematurely transferred to graver matters.

Martin was quite right in some of his contentions; girl-like, she was
spasmodic and unsystematic in her housekeeping; she had times of being
discontented and selfish. She hated economy and the need for careful
managing.

In October Alix chanced to write her a long and unusually gossipy
letter. Alix had a new gown of black grenadine, and she had sung at an
afternoon tea, and had evidently succeeded in her first venture. Also
they had had a mountain climb and enclosed were snapshots Peter had
taken on the trip.

Cherry picked up the little kodak prints; there were four or five of
them. She studied them with a pang at her heart. Alix in a loose rough
coat, with her hair blowing in the wind, and the peaked crest of
Tamalpais behind her--Alix busy with lunch boxes--Alix standing on the
old bridge down by the mill, A wave of homesickness swept over the
younger sister; life tasted bitter. She hated Alix, hated Peter, above
all she hated herself. She wanted to be there, in Mill Valley, free to
play and to dream again--

A day or two later she told Martin kindly and steadily that she thought
it had all "been a mistake." She told him that she thought the only
dignified thing to do was to part. She liked him, she would always wish
him well, but since the love had gone out of their relationship, surely
it was only honest to end it.

"What's the matter?" Martin demanded.

"Nothing special," Cherry assured him, her eyes suddenly watering.
"Only I'm tired of it all. I'm tired of PRETENDING. I can't argue about
it. But I know it's the wise thing to do."

"You acted this same way before," Martin suggested, after looking back
at his paper for a few seconds.

"I did not!" Cherry said, indignantly. "That is not true."

"You'd go back to your father, I suppose?" Martin said, yawning.

"Until I could get into something," Cherry replied with dignity. A
vague thought of the stage flitted through her mind.

"Oh!" Martin said, politely. "And I suppose you think your father would
agree to this delightful arrangement?" he asked.

"I know he would!" Cherry answered, eagerly.

"All right--you write and ask him!" Martin agreed, good-naturedly.
Cherry was surprised at his attitude, but grateful more than surprised.

"Not cross, Mart?" she asked.

"Not the least in the world!" he answered, lightly.

"Because I truly believe that we'd both be happier--" the woman said,
hesitatingly. Martin did not answer.

The next day she sat down to write her father. The house was still. Red
Creek was awakening in the heavenly October coolness, children
chattered on the way to school, the morning and evening were crisp and
sharp.

Cherry stared out at a field of stubble bathed in soft sunshine. The
hills to-day were only a shade deeper than the pale sky. Along the road
back of the house a lumber wagon rattled, the thin bay horses galloping
joyously in harness. Pink and white cosmos, pallid on clouds of frail,
bushy green, were banked in the shade of the woodshed.

She meditated, with a troubled brow. Her letter was unexpectedly hard
to compose. She could not take a bright and simple tone, asking her
father to rejoice in her home-coming. Somehow the matter persisted in
growing heavy, and the words twisted themselves about into ugly and
selfish sounds. Cherry was young, but even to her youth the phrases,
the "misunderstood" and the "uncongenial," the "friendly parting before
any bitterness creeps in," and the "free to decide our lives in some
happier and wiser way," rang false. Pauline had been divorced, a few
years ago, and the only thing Cherry disliked in her friend was her
cold and resentful references to her first husband.

No, she couldn't be a divorced woman. It was all spoiled, the innocent
past and the future; there was no way out! She gave up the attempt at a
letter, and began to annoy Martin with talk of a visit home again.

"You were there six months ago!" Martin reminded her.

"Eight months ago, Mart."

"What you want to go for?"

"Oh, just--just--" Cherry's irrepressible tears angered herself almost
as much as they did Martin. "I think they'd like me to!" she faltered.

"Go if you want to!" he said, but she knew she could not go on that
word.

"That's it," she said at last to herself, in one of her solitary hours.
"I'm married, and this is marriage. For the rest of my life it'll be
Mart and I--Mart and I--in everything! For richer for poorer, for
better for worse-that's marriage. He doesn't beat me, and we have
enough money, and perhaps there are a lot of other women worse off than
I am. But it's--it's funny."




CHAPTER IX


In January, however, he came home one noon to find her hatted and
wrapped to go.

"Oh, Mart--it's Daddy!" she said. "He's ill--I've got to see him! He's
awfully ill."

"Telegram?" asked Martin, not particularly pleased, but not
unsympathetic either.

For answer she gave him the yellow paper that was wet with her tears.
"Dad ill," he read. "Don't worry. Come if you can. Alix."

"I'll bet it's a put-up job between you and Alix--" Martin said in
indulgent suspicion.

Her indignant glance sobered him; he hastily arranged money matters,
and that night she got off the train in the dark wetness of the valley,
and was met by a rush of cool and fragrant air. It was too late to see
the mountain, lights were twinkling everywhere in the dark trees.
Cherry got a driver, rattled and jerked up to the house in a surrey,
and jumped out, her heart almost suffocating her.

Alix came flying to the door, the old lamplight and the odour of wood
smoke poured through. There was no need for words; they burst into
tears and clung together.

An hour later Cherry, feeling as if she was not the same woman who
waked in Red Creek this same morning, and got Martin's eggs and coffee
ready, crept into her father's room. Alix had warned her to be quiet,
but at the sight of the majestic old gray head, and the fine old hands
clasped together on the sheet, her self-control forsook her entirely
and she fell to her knees and began to cry again.

The nurse looked at her disapprovingly, but after all it made little
difference. Doctor Strickland roused only once again, and that was many
hours later. Cherry and Alix were still keeping their vigil; Cherry,
worn out, had been dozing; the nurse was resting on a couch in the next
room.

Suddenly both daughters were wide awake at the sound of the hoarse yet
familiar voice. Alix fell on her knees and caught the cold and
wandering hand.

"What is it, darling?" The old, half-joking maternal manner was all in
earnest now.

"Peter?" he said, thickly.

"Peter's in China, dear. You remember that Peter was to go around the
world? You remember that, Dad?"

"In the 'Travels with a Donkey,'" he said, rationally.

The girls looked at each other dubiously.

"We all read that together," Alix encouraged him.

"No--" he said, musingly. They thought he slept again, but he presently
added, "Somewhere in Matthew--no, in Mark--Mark is the human one--Mark
was as human as his Master--"

"Shall I read you from Mark?" Alix asked, as his voice sank again. A
shabby old Bible always stood at her father's bedside; she reached for
it, and making a desperate effort to steady her voice, began to read.
The place was marked by an old letter, and opened at the chapter he
seemed to desire, for as she read he seemed to be drinking in the
words. Once they heard him whisper "Wonderful!" Cherry got up on the
bed, and took the splendid dying head in her arms, the murky winter
dawn crept in, and the lamp burned sickly in the daylight. Hong could
be heard stirring. Alix closed the book and extinguished the lamp.
Cherry did not move.

"Charity!" the old man said, presently, in a simple, childish tone.
Later, with bursts of tears, in all the utter desolation of the days
that followed, Cherry loved to remember that his last utterance was her
name. But Alix knew, though she never said it, that it was to another
Charity he spoke.

Subdued, looking younger and thinner in their new black, the sisters
came downstairs, ten days later, for a business talk. Peter had been
named as one executor, but Peter was far away, and it was a pleasant
family friend, a kindly old surgeon of Doctor Strickland's own age, or
near it, and the lawyer, George Sewall, the other executor, who told
them about their affairs. Anne, as co-heiress, was present at this
talk, with Justin sitting close beside her. Martin, too, who had come
down for the funeral, was there.

Cherry was white, headachy, indifferent; she seemed stunned by her
loss; but Alix's extraordinary vitality had already asserted itself,
and she set herself earnestly to understand their somewhat complicated
affairs.

The house went to the daughters; there were books and portraits for
Anne, a box or two in storage for Anne, and Anne was mentioned in the
only will as equally inheriting with Alexandra and Charity. For some
legal reason that the lawyer and Doctor Younger made clear, Anne could
not fully inherit, but her share would be only a trifle less than her
cousins'.

Things had reached this point when Justin Little calmly and confidently
claimed that Anne's share was to be based upon an old loan of Anne's
father to his brother, a loan of three thousand dollars to float Lee
Strickland's invention, with the understanding that Vincent Strickland
be subsequently entitled to one third of the returns. As the patent had
been sold for nearly one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, one third
of it, with accumulative interest for ten years, of which no payment
had ever been made Anne, was a large proportion of the entire estate,
and the development of this claim, in Justin Little's assured, woodeny
voice, caused everyone except the indifferent Cherry to look grave.

The estate was not worth one hundred and fifty thousand dollars now, by
any means; it had been reduced to little more than two thirds of that
sum, and Anne's bright concern that everyone should be SATISFIED with
what was RIGHT, and her ingenuous pleasure in Justin's cleverness in
thinking of this possibility, were met with noticeable coldness.

If Anne was wrong, and the paper she held in her hand worthless, each
girl would inherit a comfortable little fortune, but if Anne was right,
Cherry and Alix would have only a few thousand dollars apiece, and the
old home.

The business talk was over before any of them realized the enormity of
Anne's contention, and Anne and Justin had departed. But both the old
doctor and the lawyer agreed with Martin that it looked as if Anne was
right, and when the family was alone again, and had had the time to
digest the matter, they felt as if a thunderbolt had fallen across
their lives.

"That Anne could DO it!" Alix said, over and over. Cherry seemed dazed,
spoke not at all, and Martin had said little.

"People will do anything for money!" he observed once drily. He had met
Justin sternly. "I'm not thinking of my wife's share--I didn't marry
her for her money; never knew she had any! But I'm thinking of Alix."

"Yes--we must think of darling Alix!" Anne had said, nervously eager
that there should be no quarrel. "If Uncle Lee intended me to have all
this money, then I suppose I must take it, but I shan't be happy unless
things are arranged so that Alix shall be COMFORTABLE!"

"B-but the worst of it is, Alix!" Cherry stammered, suddenly, on the
day before she and Martin were to return to Red Creek, "I--I counted on
having enough--enough to live my own life! Alix, I can't--I can't go
back!"

"Why, my darling--" Alix exclaimed, as Cherry began to cry in her arms.
"My darling, is it as bad as all that!"

"Oh, Alix," whispered the little sister, trembling, "I CAN'T bear it.
You don't know how I feel. You and Dad were always here; now that's all
gone--you're going to rent the house and try to teach singing--and I've
nothing to look forward to--I've nobody!"

"Listen, dear," Alix soothed her. "If they advise it, and especially if
Peter advises it when he gets back, we'll fight Anne. And then if we
win our fight, I'll always keep the valley house open. And if we don't,
why I'm going to visit you and Martin every year, and perhaps I'll have
a little apartment some day--I don't intend to board always--"

But she was crying, too. Everything seemed changed, cold and strange;
she had suspected that Cherry's was not a successful marriage; she knew
it now, and to resign the adored little sister to the unsympathetic
atmosphere of Red Creek, and to miss all the old life and the old
ass

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