let her know how it panned out. The letter ended with the phrases:
"Have a good time, Babe, and write me. Send me a line when you can. I
have been running some with Joe King, but I am not strong for that
crowd." It was signed: "Aff'tly, Mart."

Peter had been playing the piano lazily when the letter was tossed to
Cherry by Alix, who usually drove into the village every morning after
breakfast for marketing and the mail. He had seen Cherry glance through
it, seen the little distasteful movement of the muscles about her nose,
and seen her put it carelessly under a candlestick on the mantel for
later consideration. At luncheon she had referred to it, and now it
evidently had caused her to be thoughtful and a little troubled. An
open book was in her lap; she and Alix had gone through the farce of
saying that they would read without speaking until Peter had finished
some business telephoning; now he had joined them, but still she did
not read and seemed disinclined for talk.

"Mart may go to Mexico!" she said, presently, with a sigh.

"To stay?" Peter asked, quickly.

Cherry shrugged.

"As much as he stays anywhere!" she answered, drily.

"H'm! Does that mean you?" Alix asked.

"I suppose that's the plan," Cherry said, lifelessly.

"It's a rotten country," Peter offered, thoughtfully. "At least I
should think it would be," he added, more moderately, "to select for a
permanent home."

"I always say that a place where the natives are black, or yellow,
isn't fit for white people, or the natives would BE white!" Alix
explained, brightly.

"All mining towns are horrible!" Cherry said with gloomy fervor.
"They're raw, crude, coarse places, and the people in them are just as
bad!"

Peter had a moment of pity for her, so young, so helpless, so tied.

"Perhaps he won't want you until he is sure of staying!" he offered.

"Oh, Mart always thinks the last thing is the permanent thing!" his
wife answered, wearily. "He says he'll want me to join him about the
middle of August."

"Oh, help!" Alix said, disgustedly.

Cherry was silent a few minutes, and Peter smoked with his eyes on the
fire. Alix glanced from one to the other, sighed, and glanced down at
her magazine.

"If----" Cherry said presently, "If I get my money I'll have enough to
live on, won't I, Peter?"

"You'll have about forty thousand dollars--yes, at five per cent, you
could live on that. Especially if you lived here in the valley," Peter
answered, after some thought.

"Then I want you to know," Cherry went on quietly, with sudden scarlet
in her cheeks, "that I'm going to tell Martin I think we have tried it
long enough!" Peter looked gravely at her, soberly nodded, and resumed
his study of the fire. But Alix spoke in brisk protest.

"TRIED it! You mean tried marriage! But one doesn't try marriage! It's
a fact. It's like the colour of your eyes."

"As a matter of fact, it isn't anything of the kind," Cherry said,
mildly.

"Lloyd has given you cause, eh?" Peter took his pipe out of his mouth
long enough to ask, briefly.

"Not--not in the way you mean--" she answered, glad to be discussing
the topic.

"H'm," Peter muttered. It was almost as if he were disappointed.

"But, Peter," Cherry went on hesitatingly, appealingly, "it is no more
a marriage than if we both had--had done everything and anything! He
doesn't--oh, love!" Cherry interrupted herself scornfully on the word.
"Of COURSE he doesn't love me," she said. "But it isn't only that, it's
that we differ in every way about everything! His friends, his ideas,
his feelings about things--I can't tell you how we jar and jar on each
other! No," said Cherry, beginning to cry a little, "he hasn't been
unfaithful; I almost wish he had--"

"Cherry!" Alix protested, with affectionate reproach.

"Alix," the little sister pleaded, eagerly, "you don't know what it
is--you don't know what it is! Always meeting people I don't like,
always living in places I hate, always feeling that my own self is
being smothered and lost and shrunk, always listening to Mart
complaining and criticizing people---"

"Don't appeal to Alix!" Peter said. "She doesn't care what she does or
where she lives. She fraternized with every old maid school teacher on
the steamer, and a booze-fiend, and a woman whose husband was a native
of Borneo; and she would pick out the filthiest lairs in Honolulu and
ask me if it wouldn't be fun to live there!"

They all laughed; then Peter added, seriously:

"I'll go this far, Cherry. Lloyd married you too young."

"Oh, far too young!" she agreed, quickly. "The thing I--I can't think
of," she said, "is how young I was--only a little girl. I knew nothing;
I wasn't ready to be anybody's wife!"

Something in the poignant sorrow of her tone went straight to their
hearts, and for the first time Peter had an idea of the real suffering
she had borne. Alix's mouth was rather firmly shut, her eyes a little
narrowed, her face rather sad, as she looked into the fire.

"If I had a child, even, or if Martin needed me," Cherry said, "then it
might be different! But I'm only a burden to him----"

"His letter doesn't sound as if he thought of you as a burden," Alix
suggested, mildly.

"Ah, well, the minute I leave him he has a different tone," Cherry
explained, and Peter said, with a glance almost of surprise at his wife:

"It's an awfully difficult position for a woman of any pride, dear!"

Alix, kneeling to adjust the fire, as she was constantly tempted to do,
met his look, and laid a soot-streaked hand on his knee.

"Pete, dearest, of course it is! But--" and Alix looked doubtfully from
one to the other--"but divorce is a hateful thing!" she added, shaking
her head, "it--it never seems to me justifiable!"

"Divorce is an institution," Peter said. "You may not like it any more
than you like prisons or mad-houses; it has its uses."

"People get divorces every day!" Cherry added. "Isn't divorce better
than living along in marriage--without love?"

"Oh, love!" Alix said, scornfully. "Love is just another name for
passion and selfishness and laziness, half the time!"

"You can say that, because yours is one of the happy marriages," Cherry
said. "It might be very different--if Peter weren't Peter!"

As she said his name she sent him her trusting smile, her blue eyes
shone with affection, and the exquisite curve of her mouth deepened.
Peter smiled back, and looked away in a little confusion.

"I can't imagine the circumstances under which I shouldn't love you and
Peter!" Alix summarized it, triumphantly.

"And Martin?" Peter asked.

"Ah, well, I didn't marry Martin!" his wife reminded him quickly. "I
didn't promise to love and honour Martin in sickness and health, for
richer for poorer, for better for worse--by George!" Alix interrupted
herself, in her boyish way, "those are terrific words, you know. And a
promise is a promise!"

"And even for infidelity, you don't believe people ought to separate?"
Cherry asked.

"Nonsense!" Peter said.

"But you said--that Martin never--"

"No, I'm not speaking of Martin now!"

"Well, wouldn't that come under 'worser'?" Alix asked.

"But, my child," Peter expostulated kindly, "my dear benighted
wife--there is such a thing as a soul--a mind--a personality! To be
tied to a--well, to a coarsening influence day after day is living
death! It is worse than any bodily discomfort--"

"I don't see it!" Alix persisted. "I think there's a lot of nonsense
talked about the fammy oncompreezy--but it seems to me that if you have
a home and meals and books and friends and the country to walk in,
you--"

"Oh, Heavens, Alix, you don't know what you're talking about!" Cherry
interrupted her, impatiently. "Let Peter here go off with some chorus
girl, and see how long you--"

"It's all very well in books," Alix interrupted her sister in turn.
"But in real life I don't believe a woman ever bothers to think whether
her husband ever murmurs her name in dreams or not. I know I take Peter
as much for granted as I do Tamalpais; if he ever leaped from the
track, and stole or got drunk or wandered off after some petticoat, I'd
FIX him! I'd be furious, but I don't see myself leaving him."

Peter's brief shout of laughter rang out.

"The awful thing about that female is that it is true," he told Cherry.
"If I ever stray from the path of virtue, she'll scare me to death."

"Sometimes I think your marriage is as--as queer as my own," Cherry
said, looking from one to the other.

 Nothing more was said for several days upon the subject of a
possible divorce. The weather continued perfect, and the little
house-party on the mountaintop was complete in itself. Cherry often
went into the village with Alix, to be sure; once they all went to a
charity affair at Blithedale; sometimes a few women drove up the
winding road in the afternoon, and there were ginger-ale and cookies on
the porch; but most of the time the two sisters were alone, with Peter
joining them in the afternoons.

One afternoon Peter crossed the porch, tired and hot, and found
everything apparently deserted. He dropped into a chair, and was still
breathless from the rapid climb up-hill, when stray notes from the
piano reached his ears; a chord, a carefully played bit of bass; then a
chord again. Then slowly, but with dainty accuracy and even feeling,
Cherry began to play a strange little study of Schumann. Peter knew
that it was Cherry, because Alix's touch was always firm and sure; more
than that, he himself had played this same bit no longer ago than last
night, and he remembered now that Cherry had asked him just what it was.

He experienced a sudden and pleasing emotion; he did not stop to
analyze it. But he had been ruffled in spirit a moment before; Alix had
known he was to come on this train, and had not met him with the car,
and while he really did not mind the walk up, he disliked the feeling
that they had entirely forgotten him.

The car was gone from its usual stand under a live oak, but everybody
had not forgotten him nevertheless. Cherry was deliberately recalling
the mood and moment that also recalled him. And as the notes came
slowly, but precisely, from the cool, darkened living room, with its
fragrant masses of sweet peas and fluted Martha Washington geraniums,
Peter felt contented and serene. He looked up at the rise of Tamalpais,
only half a tone darker than the pale blue sky to-day; he looked off at
the range toward the ocean, where shimmers of heat were quivering
upward; and then he settled himself back luxuriously in his great
wicker chair and shut his eyes. Still the plaintive air came, as
caressing as a touch.

Presently there was silence; then Cherry tried another little study,
and finished it, and the hot summer stillness reigned again. The valley
swam under a haze of pure heat; a buzzard hung motionless over the
cabin, and the dry air was sweet with resinous scent of pines and
manzanita and even of tarweed.

With a sense that he had been dozing, if only for a few minutes, Peter
opened his eyes. Framed in the cabin doorway, poised like a butterfly
against the dark background of the room, stood Cherry. He knew that she
had been standing so for some time, for a full minute, perhaps more.

She was looking straight at him; one hand was hanging at her side, the
other laid over her heart, as if she had involuntarily put it there
when she saw him. Her corn-coloured hair was a little loosened; she was
not smiling. She wore something limp and transparent, of white, he
thought, or pale, pale blue, like the sky, with faint stripes making
her figure look more slender even than it was.

They looked at each other in a silence that grew more and more awkward
by great plunges. Peter had time to wish that he had kept his eyes
shut, to wish that he had smiled when he first saw her--he could not
have forced himself to smile now--to wonder how they were ever to
speak--where they were rushing--rushing--rushing--before she turned
noiselessly and vanished into the dim room.

Peter lay there, and his heart pounded. For a few minutes his senses
whirled so madly that he felt suffocated. He dared not sit up, he dared
not stir; from head to foot thrilling waves of surprise, and even a
little of terror, went over him.

Never in his life had he experienced this sort of feeling before. He
knew that he hated it, even while his whole spirit sang and soared in
the new ecstasy. A moment ago he had been a tired man, fretted because
his wife forgot to meet him; now there was something new in the world.
And rapidly all the world became only a background, only a setting, for
this extraordinary sensation. He sat up, after awhile, looked at the
familiar porch, with the potted flowers, and Alix's boxes, where
bachelor's-buttons, marguerites, and geraniums had been alternated to
make a touch of patriotic colour on July Fourth. The hills beyond still
swam in the hot sunlight, the mountain rose into the blue, but the
light that changes all life lay over them for Peter.

He said to himself that it was awkward--he did not know how he could
enter that door and talk to Cherry. And yet he knew that that meeting
of Cherry, that the common exchange of words and glances, that the
daily trifling encounters with Cherry were all poignantly significant
now. Or if he did not fully sense all this yet he felt thrilled to the
soul with the knowledge that she was there, back in the shadowy house
somewhere, with the pale striped gown and the disordered corn-coloured
hair, and that somehow they must meet, somehow they must talk together.

He felt no impulse toward hurry. He might sit on this porch another
hour, might saunter off toward the creek. It mattered nothing; the hour
was steadily approaching when she must reappear.

Alix drove in, full of animated apologies. She managed the car far
better than he, and no thought of an accident had troubled him. But she
explained that she had been to get eggs for a setting hen, and Antone
had stopped her and told her that the new calf had been prematurely
born, out on the hills, and had "been gone for die," and so she had
driven over to Juanita, and gotten the calf.

And there the calf was, two days old, and as pretty as only a baby deer
or a baby Jersey can be, roped by his woodeny little legs, and laid
stiffly in the tonneau, with utter terror in his liquid dark eyes.

"Die, nothing!" Alix said, emphatically, as she tenderly lifted the
calf out of the car. "I'm going to take him up to the barn; you run
tell Kow that Missy wants warm milk. Then you come on, Pete--and tell
me what you think!"

"Here--" Peter said, authoritatively, shouting the message, and taking
the calf from her arms; they were laughing as they entered the dry, hot
darkness of the stable. Alix's riding horse put a Roman nose
reproachfully over the bitten barrier of his box-stall.

"We've got company for you, Creep-mouse!" Peter, panting from his heavy
burden, announced. "Poor little feller!" he said to the calf.

"He's all right." Alix, rustling straw, said, confidently. "You know he
must be a twin," she said to Peter, "for that brute of a mother of his
was contentedly wandering up to the ridge, where the breeze is, and she
certainly had another little calf cavorting about her--oh, thanks,
Cherry! Here's the milk, Peter. See if the poor little beast will suck
your fingers!"

Peter took the brimming blue bowl from Cherry's fingers. She had come
like a shadow into the barn, her eyes were on the tipped surface of the
milk. She lowered it carefully into his hold, and he felt the cool
softness of her yielding fingers; he did not meet her eyes, partly
because he gave her face only one glance. They all knelt about the
calf, who after a few feeble struggles to escape altogether resigned
himself, and lay looking at them with terrified eyes.

"He's too weak to stand on his legs, perhaps I should have had the
mother brought in," Alix said, anxiously. "But he's a beautiful little
thing, the prettiest she's ever had, except that he's so thin! Isn't he
cute, Cherry?"

"He's--darling!" Cherry's voice, with its young cadences always ready
to escape from the riper tones of womanhood, echoed oddly under the
low, shingled roof of the barn. And again life seemed full of surprise
and thrill to Peter. He wanted to say something to her; could think of
nothing, and so was unusually silent throughout the ceremonies of
getting the calf to suck Alix's fingers, getting him tied in a manner
that should hold him without danger of strangulation, and bedding him
comfortably on sacks and straw. Cherry was silent, too, but Alix talked
briskly, and the necessity for constant effort and movement filled all
possible gaps.

The evening was warm, one of the two or three warm evenings that marked
the height of summer even in the high valley. While the three sat on
the wide, unroofed porch, loitering over their coffee, a great,
yellow-red moon rose slowly over the hill, and floated silently above
them. Presently its light flooded the landscape, and strange and
romantic vistas appeared between the redwoods aisles, and the tops of
the forest trees far below them showed in a brilliant gray light, soft
and furry. The whole world seemed to be lifted and swimming in vaporous
brightness. There was not a breath of air in the garden; roses and
wallflowers stood erect in a sort of luminous enchantment. Moonlight
sank through the low twisted branches of the near-by oaks and fell
tangled with black and lacy shade through the porch rose vine.

Alix sat on the porch rail, every line of crisp skirt and braided head
revealed as if by daylight, but Cherry's pale striped gown was only a
glimmer in the deepest shade of the vine. Peter, smoking, sat where he
could not but see her; they had hardly looked at each other directly
since the long, strange look of this afternoon; they had exchanged
hardly a word.

A black cat crept across the grass, her body dragging stealthily on
crouched legs, boldly silhouetted in the moonshine, invisible in the
shade. Alix defeated her hunting plans by flinging a well-aimed pebble
into the shrubbery ahead of her. The cat, dissembling, lay down in the
dry grass, cleaned a paw, and coquetted with her tail.

"Town to-morrow, Pete?" Alix said, after a silence during which she had
locked her arms behind her head, stared straight above her at the path
the moon was making through faint stars, and yawned. "I've got to go in
to a meeting of the hospital board."

"I didn't know you were on it," Cherry said.

"Peter's mother was, and hence I am," Alix said, virtuously. Cherry
felt an old little prick of jealousy. Alix was strangely indifferent to
the position she held.

"I go in to have luncheon with Mary" Cherry said. "I wish we could all
lunch together!"

"I'll blow you girls to a meal at Frank's--" Peter began, and
interrupted himself, "Oh, but you can't, Cherry!"

"And our meeting is at twelve; we'll have lunch at the hospital," Alix
added. "Wouldn't you think we'd have enough of each other, we three?"
she said, amusedly, beginning, in the reprehensible manner of girlhood,
to roll the black scarf that had been knotted about her rolled
bluejacket's collar, and to remove the pins from her hair. "But I hate
to be in town and not see you both! Good-night, beloveds. I'm dead.
Don't sit out here mooning with Pete all night, Cerise!"

Peter said to himself that now Cherry would go, too, but as the screen
door banged lightly after Alix, and the dull glimmer of Cherry's
striped gown did not move in the soft shadow, a sudden reluctance and
distaste seized him. He had been subconsciously aware of her all
afternoon; he had known a delicious warmth and stir at his heart that
he had not analyzed, if indeed it could be analyzed. Now suddenly he
did not want the beauty and bloom and charm of that feeling touched.
His heart began to beat heavily again, and he knew that he must stop
the unavailing game now.

But he had not reckoned on Cherry. She twisted in her chair, and he
heard a child's long, happy sigh.

"Oh, so am I tired, too!" she breathed, reluctantly. "I hate to leave
it--but I've been almost asleep for half an hour! You can have all the
moonlight there is, Peter." Her white figure fluttered toward the door.
"Good-night!" she said, drooping her little head to choke a yawn. A
moment later he heard her laughing with Alix.

"You fool--you fool--you fool!" Peter said to himself, and he felt an
emotion like shame, a little real compunction that he could so utterly
misread her innocence. He felt it not only wrong in him, but somehow
staining and hurtful to her.

CHAPTER XIII

Again Peter reckoned without Cherry. It was only the next day, when he
was entering the Palace court for his lunch, that he experienced a
sudden and violent emotion. His thoughts were, at the moment, far from
Cherry, and he had fancied himself in a hurry. But every other feeling
but excitement was obliterated at the sight of a slender, girlishly
made woman, in a pongee gown, and a limp brown hat covered with
poppies, waiting in the lounge.

Peter went toward her, and the colour rushed into Cherry's face. Half a
dozen women had been furtively studying her, and one of them now said
to a man, "Yes, she really is--extraordinarily pretty." But Cherry and
Peter saw and heard them not. It was the first time they had
accidentally encountered each other, and it had a special place of its
own in the history of their lives.

The surprise of it kept them laughing, hands clasped, for a minute;
then Cherry said:

"I was to lunch here with Mary Cameron. But she's full twenty minutes
late!"

"Lunch with me," Peter substituted, promptly.

"She'll probably be along--" Cherry said, vaguely, looking at a clock.
"You hate her, don't you?" she added, looking up from under the poppies
at Peter.

"I don't like her," he admitted, with a boy's grimace.

"Then suppose we don't lunch here?" Cherry suggested, innocently. Peter
laughed joyously, and tucking her little gloved hand under his arm, led
her away. They went to Solari's, and had a window table, and nodded, as
they discussed their lunch, at half a dozen friends who chanced to be
lunching there, too. But it was a thrilling adventure, none the less,
and after the other tables were empty, and when the long room was
still, they talked on, trifling with cheese and crackers, Peter
watching her as he smoked, Cherry's head bent over her plate.

She had said that she wanted to tell him "all about it," and Peter,
with quick knowledge that she meant the unhappiness of her marriage,
nodded a grave permission.

"I've made a failure of it!" Cherry said, sadly. "I know I ought to
struggle on, but I can't. Just a few days of it, just a few weeks of it
make me--make me a different woman! I get nervous, I get hysterical, I
don't sleep! I have no individuality, Peter, I have no personality! As
for my dignity--my privacy--"

Her face was scarlet, and for a moment she stopped speaking.

"Just tell me an alternative!" she said, after awhile. "It CAN'T be
that there is no other life for me than going back. Peter, I'm only
twenty-four!"

"I know you are," he said, with a brief nod.

"Why, everyone has some alternative," Cherry pleaded. "It can't be that
marriage is the only--the only irrevocable thing! If you had a partner
that you couldn't go on with, you could come to SOME agreement! You
could make a sacrifice, but somehow you could end the association!
Peter," she said, earnestly, "when I think of marketing again--six
chops and soup-meat and butter and baking powder--I feel sick! When I
think of unpacking the things I've washed and dusted for five
years--the glass berry bowl that somebody gave us, and the eleven
silver tea-spoons--I can't bear it!"

"You don't love him!" Peter said.

"I don't hate him," she answered quickly. "Indeed I don't. And it isn't
just the place and the life, Peter! I could be happy in two
rooms--somewhere--anywhere--But not--with HIM. Oh, Peter, if I hadn't
done it--if I hadn't done it!" And Cherry knotted her fingers together,
and her voice thickened and stopped.

Her beauty, as she pushed her plate aside and leaned toward him, was so
startling that Peter, a lighted match half-raised to a fresh cigarette,
put the match down aimlessly, and looked thoughtfully at the cigarette,
and laid that down, too, without the faintest consciousness of what he
was doing. The day was warm, and there was a little dampness on her
white forehead, where the gold hair clung to the brim of the drooping
hat. Her marvellous blue eyes were ringed with soft violet shadows, as
if a sooty finger had set them under the dark brown arch of the brows.
The soft curve of her chin, the babyish shortness of her upper lip, and
the crimson sweetness of the little earnest mouth had never seemed more
lovely than they were to-day. She was youth incarnate, palpitating,
flushed, unspoiled.

For a moment she looked down at the table, and the colour flooded her
face, then she looked him straight in the eyes and smiled. "Well!
Perhaps it will all work out right, Peter," she said, with the
childish, questioning look that so wrung his heart. She immediately
gathered her possessions together to go, but when they stepped into
sunshiny Geary Street it was three o'clock, and Peter suggested that
they walk down to the boat.

To them both the hour was memorable, and the street and park and the
tops of tall buildings, flooded with the sunlight of a summer
afternoon, were Paradise. Cherry only knew that she felt strangely
thrilled and yet at peace; Peter's heart was bursting with love of the
world, love of this romantic city, with its flower market blazing in
the sun, and with the ferry clock tower standing high above the vista
of Market Street. He seemed floating rather than walking, and when, at
crossings, he could help Cherry for a few steps, felicity swelled in
his soul almost like pain.

They met Alix on the boat, but she did not ask any embarrassing
questions; she sat between them on the upper deck, blinking contentedly
at the blue satin bay, her eyes following the wheeling gulls or the
passage of ships, her mind evidently concerned only with the idle
pleasantness of the moment. And always, for Peter, there was the same
joyous sense of something new--something significant--something
ecstatic in life.

From that hour he was never quite at ease in Cherry's company, and
avoided being alone with her even for an instant, although her presence
always caused him the new and tingling delight. He read her honest blue
eyes truly, and knew that although, like himself, she was conscious of
the new sweetness and brightness of life, she had never entertained for
an instant the flitting thought that it was Peter's feeling for her
that made it so. She thought perhaps that it was the old childish
happiness that she had known in the valley, the freedom and leisure and
irresponsibility of the old days.

One day she made Alix and Peter laugh by reciting for them long
passages from "Paolo and Francesca." They were walking, and had stopped
to rest and get breath on a steep climb. Cherry's tender voice,
half-amusedly and half-seriously repeating the passionate lines,
lingered in Peter's mind like a sort of faint incense for hours.

"It's lovely," said Cherry in the garden that night, when he spoke to
her about it, "but it's not Shakespere, of course," she surprised him
by adding. Cherry had developed, he thought, she had cared nothing for
Shakespere years ago. Immediately she began the immortal phrases:

  'Tis but the name that is mine enemy,
  Thou art thyself, though, not a Montague ...
  ... And for that name which is no part of thee
  Take all myself!

Peter's heart began to thump again. They were alone in the garden; it
was dark to-night, warm and starry.

"Now that you and I are brother and sister," Cherry said, after a
silence, "tell me--it went across my mind once, and then I didn't think
of it for years. But tell me, was it me with whom you were--you fancied
you were in love, all those years ago?"

She looked innocently up at him in the gloom, and laughed. Peter did
not speak for a few seconds.

"Yes, it was always you!" he said then, briefly.

Cherry laughed again, a little amused and exultant laugh. But
immediately she stopped laughing, and said, vexedly:

"I was a fool to ask you that! I don't know why I did. Just sheer
egotism--and I hate women who dwell on their own foolish old love
affairs, too!"

Peter, as ashamed as she of the moment's weakness, laughed, too.

"You could hardly call it that!" he objected, mildly.

"You could hardly call it anything!" she agreed, in relief. "Does Alix
know?" she asked, quickly.

"There wasn't much to tell," he reminded her, as they went back to the
house through the ranks of wet wallflowers and roses.

"Nothing!" she said again, quickly.

And when they entered the house he was strangely disturbed to see a
look of something like shame, something confused and embarrassed on her
usually frank little face, and to realize that she was conscientiously
avoiding his eyes. After she and Alix had gone to bed he got down the
little red volume that was marked "Romeo and Juliet," and found the
score of lines that she had quoted, and marvelled that the same words
could seem on the printed page so bare, and sound so rich and full in
Cherry's voice out under the stars.

The next day she talked in a troubled, uncertain way of going back to
Red Creek and he knew why. But Alix was so aghast at the idea, and
Peter, who was closing Doctor Strickland's estate, was so careful to
depart early in the mornings, and return only late at night, that the
little alarm, if it was that, died away. Martin's plans were uncertain,
and Cherry might be needed as a witness in the Will Case, if Anne's
claims were proved unjustified, so that neither Peter nor Cherry could
find a logical argument with which to combat Alix's protests against
any change.

The next time that Cherry went into town, Alix did not go, and Peter,
sitting on the deck of the early boat with her, asked her again to have
luncheon with him. Immediately a cloud fell on her face, and he saw her
breast rise quickly.

"Peter," she asked him, childishly, looking straight into his eyes,
"why didn't we tell Alix about that?"

Peter tried to laugh and felt himself begin to tremble again.

"About what?" he stammered.

"About our having been three hours at lunch last week?"

"Why--I don't know!" Peter said, smiling nervously.

She was silent, and they parted without any further reference to
meeting for lunch. But every time he was summoned to the telephone
Peter felt a thrill of expectation, and at noon his office swam
suddenly before his eyes when the lovely voice was really addressing
him. She was at the ferry, Cherry said; she had finished shopping, and
was going home.

"That's fine!" Peter said, quite as he would have said it a month ago.
But he was shaking as he went back to his work.

That night, when Alix had gone to bed, he entered the sitting room
suddenly to find Cherry hunting for a book. She had dropped on one
knee, the better to reach a low shelf, and was wholly absorbed in the
volume she had chanced to open.

When she heard the door open she turned, and immediately became very
pale. She did not speak as Peter came to stand beside her.

"Cherry--" he said in a whisper, his face close to hers. Neither spoke
again for awhile. Cherry was breathing hard, Peter was conscious only
of a wild whirling of brain and senses.

They remained so, their eyes fixed, their breath coming as if they had
been running, for endless seconds.

"You remember the question you asked me this morning?" Peter said. "Do
you remember? Do you remember?"

Cherry, her cold fingers still holding the place in the book she had
been reading, went blindly to the fireplace.

"What?" she said, in the merest breath. "What?"

"Because," Peter said, following her, a sort of heady madness making
him only conscious of that need to hear from her own lips that she
knew, "because I didn't answer that question honestly!"

It mattered not what he said, or what he was trying to express; both
were enveloped in the flame of their new relationship; surprise and
terror were eclipsing even the strange joy of their discovery.

"I must go home--I must go back to Mart to-morrow!" Cherry said, in a
whispered undertone, as if half to herself. "I must go home to Mart
to-morrow! I--let's not--let's not talk!" she broke off in quick
interruption, as he would have spoken. "Let's--I'd rather not! I--where
IS my book? What was I doing? Peter--Peter--"

"Just a minute!" Peter protested, thickly. "Cherry--I want to speak to
you--will you wait a minute?"

She was halfway to the door; now she paused, and looked back at him
with frightened eyes. Peter did not speak at once; there was a moment
of absolute silence.

CHAPTER XIV

And in that moment Alix came in. She had said good-night half an hour
before; she was in her wrapper, and her hair fell over one shoulder in
a rumpled braid. Cherry, sick with fright, faced her in a sort of
horror, unable to realize, at the moment, that there was nothing
betraying in her attitude or Peter's, and nothing in her sister's
unsuspicious soul to give significance to what she saw in any case.
Peter, more quickly recovering self-control, went toward his wife.

Alix saw neither clearly, her eyes were full of tears, and she had a
paper in her hand.

"Pete!" she said. "Cherry! Look at this! Look at this!"

She held the paper out to them, but it was rather at her that they
looked, as all three gathered near the hearth again.

"I happened to finish my novel," Alix said, "and I reached for Dad's
old Bible--it's been there on the shelf near my bed ever since I was
married, and I've even read it, too! But look what was in it--there all
this time!"

"What is it?" Cherry asked, as Peter, in a sudden and violent revulsion
of feeling, took the paper and bent toward the lamp to read it.

"By George!" he said, suddenly, his eyes still running over the
half-sheet. "By George, this is wonderful!"

"It's Uncle Vincent's receipt to Dad for that three thousand that is
making all the trouble!" Alix exulted to the still bewildered Cherry.
"It's been there all this time--and Cherry," she added, in a voice rich
with love and memory, "THAT'S what he meant by saying it was in
Matthew, don't you remember? Doesn't it mean that, Pete? Isn't it
perfectly clear?"

"It means only about fifty thousand for you and Cherry," Peter
answered. "Yes sir, by George--it's perfectly clear! He paid it
back--every cent of it, and got his receipt! H'm--this puts rather a
crimp in Little's plans--I'll see him to-morrow. This calls off his
suit--"

"REALLY, Pete!" Alix asked, with dancing eyes. "And it means that you
can keep the old house, Cerise," she exclaimed, triumphantly, "and we
can be together part of the year anyway! Oh, come on, everybody, and
sit down, and let's talk and talk about it! Let me see it again--'in
recognition of all claims against the patent extinguisher
aforementioned'--sit down, Pete, it's only ten o'clock! Let's talk.
Aren't you simply WILD with joy, Cherry?"

But she told Peter later that she had been surprised at Cherry's
quietness; Cherry had looked pale and abstracted, and had not seemed
half enthusiastic enough.

"Though very probably," mused Alix, "it brought back Dad's death, and
saddened her in that way, and more than that, I know she is worried all
the time about feeling as she does toward Martin, and perhaps he'll
feel that she ought to put this into some horrible mining scheme!
Cherry is not mercenary, I'll say that for her."

"What will you do with all yours?" Peter asked.

"I wish we three could go about the world together," Alix answered.
"I'd love to see Japan and India--I'd like to see burning-ghats on the
sacred Gunga!" she added, cheerfully. "But I don't know--money doesn't
buy you much!" she yawned. "Perhaps I'll go to some Old Ladies' Home,
and give each of the old girls one hundred dollars a quarter--wouldn't
they have fun, buying scarfs and wool and caps?"

"Their families would immediately remove them, for the revenue," Peter
suggested. He was grinning at her; he felt suddenly the wholesomeness
and safety of her absurdity and originality. He liked the
characteristic earnestness with which, in the very act of snapping off
her bedroom light, before going out to the sleeping-porch, she widened
her eyes at him, and frowned in concentrated thought.

"Then I'll give them fifty dollars a quarter!" she decided. "Just
enough to buy them some little things, you know, brass tea-kettles,
flannel underwear, whatever they wanted! Presents--they must always
want to be making Christmas presents." And she yawned again. "Shut your
door, Pete, if you read," she said. "The light shines against the
trees, and it's right in my eyes!" But ten minutes later he heard her
call through the door, "Or I could give it on condition that they
stayed in the home and didn't let their families get it!" and grinned
again over his book.

After that there was silence, and gradually the little sounds of the
summer night made themselves heard again. Alix's light was out. Cherry
came, trailing her thin wrapper, to the porch bed opposite her sister's
bed and slipped into it with only a brief good-night. But Peter read on
deep into the first hours of the morning.

Kow Yu, flinging the striped blue tablecloth over the porch table the
next day at the noon hour, and clinking knives and forks, was
questioned by his master.

"You go catchem 'nother plate, Kow!" Peter said.

"Missy no come!" Kow answered, unruffled. "Him say no can come!"

"Cherry!" Peter shouted. "Did Alix say she wasn't coming to lunch?"

"N-n-not to me!" Cherry answered from the garden. She came up to the
porch, with her hands full of short-stemmed roses.

"Him go flend house," Kow elucidated. "Fiend heap sick!"

"Mrs. Garvin?" Cherry questioned. "Did she stay at Mrs. Garvin's for
lunch? Perhaps it's the Garvin baby," she added to Peter. "She said she
was going to stop in!"

"I'll find out!" Peter was conscious that everything was beginning to
tremble and thrill again, as he went to the telephone. "Why, yes," he
said, coming back to the porch, "the baby arrived just before she got
there, and they were all upset. She's in her glory, of course. Says
that she'll be home to supper, even if she goes back!"

"Oh!" Cherry said, in a small voice. She sat down at the table, and
shook out her napkin. Peter sat down, too, and, as usual, served. Kow
came and went, and a silence deepened and spread and grew more and more
terrible every instant.

It was a Sunday, foggy and overcast, but not cold. The vines about the
porch were covered with tiny beads of moisture; among the bushes in the
garden little scarfs and veils of fog were caught, and from far across
the ridge the droning warning of the fog horn penetrated, at regular,
brief intervals.

"Cherry," Peter said, suddenly, when the silent meal was almost over,
"will you talk about it?"

"Talk--?" she faltered. Her voice thickened and stopped. "Oh, I would
rather not!" she whispered, with a frightened glance about.

"Listen, Cherry!" he said, following her to the wide porch rail, and
standing behind her as she sat down upon it. "I'm sorry! I'm just as
sorry as I can be. But I can't help it, Cherry. And I would like--I do
think it would be wiser, just to--to look the matter squarely in the
face, and--and perhaps discuss it for a few minutes, and then END it."

She gave him a fleeting glance over her shoulder, but she did not go
away. Peter sat down behind her on the rail, and she turned to face
him, although her troubled eyes were still averted.

"Cherry," he said then, "I'm as surprised as you are--I can't tell you
when it--it all happened! But it--" Peter folded his arms across his
chest, and with a grimly squared jaw looked off into the misty
distance--"it is there," he finished.

"Oh, I'm so sorry!" Cherry whispered, on a breath of utter distress.
"I'm so sorry! Oh, Peter, we never should have let it happen--our
caring for each other!--we never should have allowed ourselves to
think--to dream--of such a thing! Oh, Peter, I'm so sick about it,"
Cherry added, incoherently, with filling eyes. "I'm just sick about it!
I know--I know that Alix would never have permitted herself to--I know
she wouldn't!"

He was close to her, and now he laid his hand over hers.

"I care--" he said, quite involuntarily, "I have always cared for you!
I know it's madness--I know it's too late--but I love every hair of
your beautiful head! Cherry--Cherry--!"

They had both gotten to their feet, and now she essayed to pass him,
her face white, her cheeks blazing. He stopped her, and held her close
in his arms, and after a few seconds he felt her resisting muscles
relax, and they kissed each other.

For a full dizzy minute they clung together, arms locked, hearts
beating madly and close, and lips meeting again and again. Breathless,
Cherry wrenched herself free, and turned to drop into a chair, and
breathless, Peter stood looking down upon her. About them was the
silence of the dripping garden; all the sounds of the world came
muffled and dull through the thick mist.

Then Peter knelt down beside her chair, and gathered her hands together
in his own, and she rested her forehead on his, and spent and silent,
leaned against his shoulder. And so they remained, not speaking, for a
long while. Kow clinked dishes somewhere in a faraway kitchen, and the
fog-horn boomed and was still-boomed and was still. But here on the
porch there was no sound.

"Cherry, tell me that you care for me a little?" Peter said after
awhile, and he felt as if he met a new Cherry, among all the strange
new Cherries that the past bewildering week had shown him, when she
answered passionately:

"Oh, Peter--Peter--if I did not!"

He tightened his fingers about her own, but did not answer, and it was
presently Cherry who broke the brooding, misty silence again.

"What shall we do?" she asked, in a small, tired voice.

Peter abruptly got to his feet, took a chair three feet away, and with
a quick gesture of his hand and toss of his head, flung back his hair.

"There is only one thing to do, of course!" he said, decidedly, in a
voice almost unrecognizably grim. "We mustn't see each other--we
mustn't see each other! Now--now I must think how best to manage that!"

Her eyes, heavy with pain, were raised to meet his, and she saw his
mouth weaken with a sudden misgiving, and she saw him try to steady it,
and look down.

"I can--I shall tell Alix that this new business needs me in town for
two or three nights," he said, forcing himself to quiet speech, but
with one fine hand propping his forehead as if it ached. "I'll stay at
the club."

"And as soon as I can go," Cherry added, feverishly, "I shall join
Martin. I suppose Alix would think it was perfectly idiotic for me to
go now, just when the whole thing can be closed up so quickly, and
Martin, too--" her voice trailed away vaguely. She fell silent, her
eyes absent and full of pain. Suddenly they widened, as if some pang
had suddenly shaken her into consciousness again. "Well, I'll go back,"
she began again, bravely, "I'll leave you power--what do they call
it?--power to act for me. I can do that, can't I? I'll wire Martin
to-morrow--this is Sunday, and I'll go on Wednesday!" And as she looked
off across the green spaces of fog-wreathed hills and valleys, they
seemed to turn suddenly glaring and ugly to her, and she felt a great
weariness and heartsickness with life.

Peter sprang over the porch rail, and vanished, walking with swift
energy up the trail that led toward the mountain. Cherry knew that he
would walk himself tired; she longed to walk, too, to plunge on and on
through the foggy depths of the hills, striding, stumbling, getting
breathless and weary in body, while somehow--somehow!--this confusion
and exhaustion cleared away from mind and soul. And yet beyond the
horror and shame and regret she felt something was thrilling, exulting,
and singing for joy.

For the rest of that day she lived in a sort of daze of emotion,
sometimes she seemed to be living two lives, side by side. In the one
was her old happy relationship with Alix, and even with Peter, the old
joking and talking, and gathering for meals, the old hours in the
garden or beside the fire, and in the other was the confused and
troubled and ecstatic consciousness of the new relationship between
Peter and herself, the knowledge that he did not merely admire her, did
not merely feel for her an unusual affection, but that he was consumed
by a burning adoration of her slightest motion, the turn of her wrist,
the smile she gave Kow at breakfast time, the motion she made when she
stooped to tie her shoe, or raised her arm to break an apple from the
low, dusty branches. The glory of being so loved enveloped her like a
great shining garment, and her cheeks glowed softly rosy, and there was
a new and liquid softness, a sort of shining glitter, in her blue eyes.

Peter was quiet that evening, and was gone the next morning when the
sisters came out to breakfast. His absence was a real relief to Cherry,
who felt curiously tired and spent after a wakeful night, and looked
pale. Alix, busy with a new venture in duck raising, noticed nothing,
and Cherry could lie idly in the hammock all morning, sometimes
frowning, and shutting her eyes at some sudden thought, otherwise
smiling and dreaming vaguely, and always hearing Peter's voice, in
words so charged with new magic that the mere recollection of them
almost suffocated her with emotion.

He had left a message to the effect that he would not be at home that
night, and at four o'clock telephoned confirming the message. Alix
chanced to answer the telephone, and Cherry, who was in her room, heard
Peter's name, and stood still, listening with a shock of
disappointment. She did not want him to come home, she was hardly
conscious of any desire or dread; her only thought was that he was
there--now--at the telephone, and in a moment Alix would have hung up
the receiver, and she, Cherry, would not have spoken to him, would not
have heard his voice!

But at eight o'clock that evening, when she and Alix were sitting on
the porch, when the last ebbing pink of the sunset had faded, and great
spiders had ventured forth into the dusk and the dews, there was a
sudden hail at the gate, and Cherry knew that it was he! A flood of
utter, irrational happiness rose in her heart; she had been racked with
hunger for the sound of that voice; she had been restless and
unsatisfied, almost feverish with longing and doubt; now peace came
again, and content.

He came up to them, his glance resolutely averted from Cherry,
explaining that he was lonesome, assuring them that everything went
well, and making them laugh with an account of Justin Little's
reception of the new turn of affairs. Alix asked a hundred questions;
laughed and rejoiced.

"To-morrow let's go down and see the old house," suggested Alix, "I
guess it's in pretty bad shape, for we couldn't rent it. At least Pete
and I didn't think it was worth while to do all the plastering and
painting they wanted! But we'll do it now, Cherry; we'll fix it all up,
and then every summer, and perhaps some winters--at least if Mart isn't
too far away--you can live there. Did you see Anne, Peter?" she asked,
suddenly.

"No, just Justin. He seemed absolutely dumbfounded," Peter said. "He
looked at the paper, read it, laughed, and said--in that little
nervous, smiling way of his--that he felt it to be by no means
conclusive--"

"I can hear him!" giggled Alix.

"And I guess both you girls will have to come in in a day or two,"
Peter continued.

"Cherry's going in to the dentist to-morrow," said Alix.

"Oh, so I am!" Cherry said, in a rather strained voice.

She did not look at Peter, nor did he at her, but they felt each
other's thoughts like a spoken word.

"Had you forgotten?" Alix asked. "I may go with you," she added,
carelessly.

"Oh, do come!" Cherry said, eagerly. "I--I hate so going alone!"

"I've not a thing in the world to do in town, but I'll browse along
those old book stores in Third Street," Alix mused.

But in the morning she had changed her mind. She was a trifle late to
breakfast, and Cherry and Peter had a chance minute or two alone.

"Cherry," he said then, "I'm going to lunch at the St. Francis. Will
you meet me there?"

"No, I can't!" Cherry whispered, unhappily.

"Well, I'll be there," Peter said, in a dull, steady voice. They did
not look at each other as Cherry began, with trembling white ringers,
to strip the black fine skin from a fig.

A moment later Alix joined them. She had come in from her ducks, and
ate but a hasty and indifferent breakfast so that she might the sooner
begin to prepare their meal. The ducks had been regaled of late on the
minced remains of all the family meals, Alix spending an additional
half-hour at the table while she cut fruit-rinds, cold biscuits, and
vegetables into small pieces, for her gluttonous pensioners.

"Wait for the ten o'clock train, Pete, and go in with Cherry!" said
Alix, holding a small piece of omelet close to the nose of the
importunate Buck. "Go on, be a sport!--DON'T YOU DARE," she added, to
the dog, who rolled restless and entreating eyes, banged his tail on
the floor, and allowed a faint, disconsolate whimper to escape him. "I
don't think I'll go in," she explained, "for I have about a week's work
here to do. Those Italian boys are coming up to thin the lettuce, and
Kow is going to put up the peaches, and if you both are gone I can have
a regular orgy of housekeeping--really, I'd rather. Here, take it--the
dear old Buckboy--well, did he get so mad he couldn't see out of his
eyes!" she added, affectionately, to Buck, as the omelet disappeared
with one snap of his jaws. She folded his two fringed ears into his
eyes, and laid her face against his shining head. "Well, this isn't
feeding the ducks!" she finished, jumping up. "Come see them, Pietro,
they're too darling!"

"They're extremely dirty and messy," Peter complained, following with
Cherry nevertheless, to see her scatter her chopped food carelessly on
the surface of the little pond, the struggling bodies of the ducklings,
and the bobbing downy heads alike. With quacking and wriggling and
dabbling, the meal was eaten, and Alix, scraping the bowls for last
fragments, and blinking in a flood of sunlight, laughed exultantly at
the exhibition.

Peter left them there, without one word or look for Cherry, who went
back to the house with her sister in a most agitated and wretched state
of mind. She had the telephone in her hand, to cancel the engagement
with her dentist, when Alix suddenly consented to accompany her into
town; "and at lunch-time we'll take a chance on the St. Francis, Sis,"
Alix said, innocently, "for Peter almost always lunches there!"

Feeling that the question was settled, yet restless and unsatisfied
still, Cherry dressed for town; they climbed into the car; Alix's firm
hands, in yellow chamois gloves, sparched at the wheel; the die was
cast.

Yet at the station another change of plan occurred, for as Alix brought
the car to the platform Anne came toward them from the arriving train,
a gloved and demure and smiling Anne, anxious, she explained, to talk
over this newest development, and "whether it proved to be of any value
or not," to try to find out what Uncle Lee had really WANTED for them
all, and then agree to do that in a friendly manner, out of court. Alix
turned from the wheel, to face Cherry in the back seat, and Anne leaned
on the door of the tonneau.

"My first feeling, when Frenny told me," said Anne, chatting pleasantly
in the shade, "was one of such RELIEF! For I hadn't wanted all that
money one bit," she confessed, gaily. "I only wanted to do what was
FAIR. Only two or three nights ago I said to Frenny that it really
belonged to us all, and last night we talked and talked about it, and
the result was that I said that I must see the girls--we three are the
only ones concerned, after all, and"--Anne's old half-merry and
half-pouting manner was unchanged--"what we decide is what really
matters!" she finished.

"Why, there is no question that it's Daddy's handwriting," Cherry said,
with what, for her, was sharpness, "and it seems to me--it seems to me
Anne--" she added, hesitatingly.

"That you have a nerve!" Alix finished, not with any particular venom.
"That document throws the case out of court," she said, flatly. "Peter
is confident of that!"

Anne's pale face flushed a trifle, and her eyes narrowed.

"Yes, but it doesn't throw the WILL out of court," she said quickly.

"You proposed to break the Will!" Alix reminded her, getting angry.

"I know I did, but it might be valid, after all, and under that Will I
inherit only a fifth less than you and Cherry!" Anne answered, also
with feeling. "That's just what I came over to talk about," she added,
still smiling. "Isn't it better," and all friendliness and appeal were
in her voice, "isn't it better to do it all in a kindly manner, than to
fight about it? Why, we can easily settle it among ourselves," she
assured them, sensibly.

Alix shrugged, and looked down at the wheel of her car with a doubtful
shake of her head. Cherry, now standing beside it on the platform, was
flushed and uncomfortable. There was an awkward pause.

"Board?" shouted a trainman, with a rising inflection. The sisters
looked at each other in a panic of haste.

"I can't leave this car here." Alix exclaimed. "I've got to park her
and lock her and everything! Run get on board, Cherry, I don't have to
go in anyway--you've got a date!"

Cherry's heart leaped, sank coldly, and leaped again, as with a swift
nod of parting she hurried for her train. The other two women watched
her with forced interest as she climbed on board, and as the train
slipped noiselessly out of sight. It curved among the redwoods, and was
gone before either spoke again. Then, as her eyes met Anne's friendly,
questioning smile, Alix said awkwardly:

"I think the only thing to do is for you and Justin to take this up
with Peter, Anne. I mean--I mean that you were the ones who proposed to
bring it into court in the first place, and--and I don't understand
much about it!"

"Alix, don't let's talk in a cold, hard, legal way," Anne pleaded. She
had gotten into the back seat, and was leaning on the front seat in an
informal sort of way. "Let's just try to get each other's point of
view!" she suggested. "The idea is that Uncle Lee wanted all his girls
to inherit alike--"

"That idea didn't seem to impress you much a week ago!" Alix said, glad
to feel herself getting angry.

"My dear, I was going to divide it to the last PENNY!" Anne assured
her, widening her eyes.

Alix was silent, but the silence shouted her unbelief.

"Truly, I was," Anne went on. "This--this discovery only complicates
matters. Why, the last thing in the world that dear Uncle Lee would
wish would be to have us drag the family name into a law-suit--"

"You and Justin began it!" Alix reminded her, goaded into reluctant
speech.

"I beg your pardon!" It was a favourite phrase of Anne's. "But it was
Peter who said he would fight!"

"Well, because you made the claim!" Alix, hating herself for being
betrayed into argument, said hotly. "But I won't talk about it, Anne,"
she added, firmly, "and as far as coming to any agreement with me is
concerned, you might just as well have gone back on the train with
Cherry. I hate to talk this way--but we all think you acted very--well,
very meanly!" Alix finished rather flatly.

"Perhaps it's just as well to understand each other!" Anne said, with
hot cheeks. They exchanged a few more sentences, wasted words and angry
ones, and then Anne walked over to a seat in the shade, to wait for
another train, and Alix, with her heart beating hard and her colour
high, drove at mad speed back to the mountain cabin.

"I didn't ask her to lunch--I don't care!" Alix said to herself, in
agitation. "She and Justin know they're beaten--they're just trying to
patch it up before it's too late--I don't care--I won't have her think
she can get away with any such scheme--!"

And so muttering and scolding, Alix got back to her dog and her
barnyard, and soothed herself with great hosing and cleaning of the
duck-pond, and much skimming and tasting of Kow's preserves. After all,
she had grudged this perfect summer day to the city, and she was always
happiest here, in the solitude of the high mountain.

CHAPTER XV

Meanwhile, Cherry, in the sick flutter of spirits that had become
familiar to her of late, kept her dentist appointment, and at noon
looked at a flushed and lovely vision of herself in the dentist's
mirror.

"Doctor has given me red lips!" said Cherry, trembling, and trying to
smile to the nurse in attendance.

"I guess the good Lord gave you your looks," Miss Maloney said
generously. "You're the youngest-looking--to be married!" she added. "I
said to my sister last week, 'That lady has been married nearly six
years!' 'What!' she said, 'That little girl of eighteen--!'"

"Why--why don't you come and have lunch with me, at the 'Pheasant'?"
Cherry said, suddenly, pushing up the golden hair under her hat.

"I'd love it," Miss Maloney said, appreciatively, "but Doctor has a one
o'clock appointment after this one, and I shan't get a bite until
nearly three. I've got crackers here--"

Cherry went out into the blazing street; it was one of the hot
noontides of the year. At two o'clock a wild wind would spring up, and
send papers and dust flying, but just now the heat was dry and clear
and still.

She was carrying a parasol, and she opened it now and walked slowly
toward Geary Street. She could go and have a cup of tea and a salad at
the Pheasant--she could go to the Pheasant--

But she made not the slightest effort to go there. Beyond saying the
words, she had no intention of doing so. She could not even frame in
her thoughts the utter blankness of the feeling that swept over her at
missing an opportunity to see Peter. She turned and went slowly up past
the big shop windows that reflected the burning Plaza, and so came to
the cool, great doorway of the St. Francis. Inside was tempered light
and much noiseless coming and going, meeting and parting. Chinese boys
in plum colour and pale blue went about with dustpans gathering fallen
cigar and cigarette ashes; a pleasant traffic in magazines and
cigarettes and candy and flowers was incessant, back in the dim wide
passageways.

Cherry drifted into the big, deep-carpeted waiting-room; there were
other women there, sunk into the big leather chairs, watching the
doors, and glancing at the clock. The high windows gave directly upon
Powell Street, where cable-cars were grating to and fro, and where
motor-horns honked, but all noises were filtered here to a sort of
monotone, and the effect of the room was of silence. When a man came
hastily in the door one woman rose, there was a significant smile, a
murmured greeting, before the two vanished.

In a luxurious chair Cherry waited. Peter certainly would not come in
until half-past twelve, perhaps not then. Long before that time she
might decide to go away; meanwhile, this was a pleasant and restful
place to be. It was cool in here, and the murmuring and waiting women
left in the air the delicate scents of perfumes and of the flowers they
wore.

Suddenly, with a spring of her heart against her ribs, she saw Peter's
dark head with its touches of iron gray. Groomed and brushed
scrupulously as always, with the little limp, yet as always dignified
and erect, he came to stand before her, and she stood up, and their
hands met. Flushed and a little confused, she followed him to an
inconspicuous table in a corner of the dining room. Then the dreamlike
unreality and beauty of their hours together began again. Cherry felt
adjusted, untrammelled, at ease; she felt that all the uncomfortable
sensations of the past two hours were absurd, forgotten.

"Did you expect me to meet you?" she smiled. For answer he looked at
her thoughtfully a minute before his own face lighted with a bright
smile.

"I don't think I thought of your not being there," he confessed. "I was
simply moving all morning toward the instant of meeting. I had a mental
picture of you, always before my eyes, and when you stood up there, it
was just my picture come real!"

"If THIS is real!" she said, musingly. "Sometimes my thoughts get
so--so mixed," she added, "that I feel as if Alix and the valley--and
Martin especially--were all a dream, and this the true thing."

"I know how you feel!" Peter answered. He watched her, almost with
anxiety, for a moment, then turned his attention to the bill of fare.
But Cherry was not hungry, and she paid small attention to the order,
or to the food when it came.

Presently they were talking again, in that hunger for self-analysis
that is a part of new love. They thrilled at every word, Cherry raising
her eyes, shining with eagerness, to his, or Peter watching the little
down-dropped face in an agony of adoration. An hour passed, two hours,
after awhile they were walking, still with that strange sense of
oneness and of solitude, and still as easily as if they had been
floating, to the ferry.

Alix met them in Mill Valley with vivid accounts of the day; she had
been pondering the brief talk with Anne, and was anxious to have
Peter's view of it. Peter was of the opinion that Anne's conduct
indicated very clearly that she and Justin realized that their case was
lost.

"Then you're fixed for life, Cherry," was Alix's first remark. "Oh,
say!" she added, in a burst. "Let's go down to the old house to-morrow,
will you? Let's see what it needs, and how much would have to be done
to make it fit to live in!"

Cherry flushed, staring steadily at her sister, and Peter, too, was
confused, but Alix saw nothing. The next day she carried her point, and
took them with her down to the old house. It had stood empty since her
marriage, for winter storms had gone hard with it, and the small rent
it would have brought them through the summer months was not enough to
warrant the expense of putting it in order. It looked neglected and
shabby; it was almost buried in the dry over-growth of the untended
garden. There was a drift of colourless leaves on the porch, the steps
were deep in the dropped needles of the redwoods, the paths were quite
lost to sight under a fine wash of winter mud, and the roses and lilacs
were grown woody and wild.

Alix was suddenly silent, and Cherry was pale and fighting tears, as
they crossed the porch, and fitted the key in the door. Inside the
house the air was close and stale, odorous of dry pine walls and of
unaired rooms. Peter flung up a window, the girls walked aimlessly
about, through the familiar yet shockingly strange chairs and table
that were all coated thickly with dust. Somehow this dust gave Cherry a
desolate sensation, it covered everything alike: the spectacle case and
the newspaper that still lay on her father's desk; the cups and glasses
that remained, face downward at the sink, from some last meal. Her
hands and Alix's were speedily coated with it, too; they felt sad and
unnatural here, in the house where they had spent so many years.

"It needs everything!" Alix said, after a first quick tour of
inspection, eyeing a great weather streak on the raw plaster of the
dining-room wall. "It needs air, cleaning, straightening,
flowers---Gosh, how it does need people!"

"I--I can't bear it!" Cherry said softly, in a sick undertone.

Alix, who was rapidly recovering her equilibrium, sprang upstairs
without hearing her, but Cherry did not follow. She went to the open
front doorway and stood there, leaning against the sill, and gazing
sadly out at the shabby, tangled garden that had sheltered all the
safety and joy and innocence of her little girl days.

"Peter," she said, as he came to stand beside her, "I'm so unhappy!"

"I'm sorry!" he said, simply.

"I can't--I can't ever be here!" Cherry half-whispered. "At least I
can't until some day--years from now--years from now!--when you and I
have forgotten---"

"I never shall forget," he said. And after awhile he added, "Shall you?"

"No," she whispered, her eyes brimming until the dry and dusty green of
the garden swam before her.

"Cherry, will you end it?" he asked her, huskily.

She gave him a startled look.

"End it?" she faltered.

"Will you--do you think you are brave enough to give everything else up
for me?" he asked.

"Peter!" said Cherry, hardly above a breath.

"Will you go away with me?" Peter went on, feverishly. "That's the only
way, now. That's the only way--now. Will you go away?"

"Go away!" Cherry's face was ashen as she moved her tragic and
beautiful eyes to his. "Go away where?"

"Anywhere!" Peter answered, confusedly. "Anywhere!" He did not meet her
look, his own went furtively about the garden. Immediately he seemed to
regain self-control. "I'm talking like a fool!" he said, quickly. "I
don't know what I'm saying half the time! I'm sorry--I'm sorry, Cherry.
Don't mind me. Say that you'll forgive me for what I said!"

He had taken her hands, and they were looking distressedly and soberly
at each other when an unexpected noise made them step quickly apart.
Cherry's heart beat madly with terror, and Peter flushed deeply.

It was Martin Lloyd's aunt, Mrs. North, their old neighbour, who came
about the corner of the house, and approached them smilingly. How much
had she seen? Cherry asked herself, in a panic. What were they
doing?--what were they saying as she appeared?--how much had their
attitude betrayed them?

Mrs. North was the same loud-laughing, cheerful woman as of old. She
had moved to Portland to be near Martin's mother, some years before,
and was delighted with the chance that had brought her back to the
valley on the very day that brought the Strickland girls back to the
old house.

She kissed Cherry, and was full of queries for Martin.

"Durango? Belle told me something about his going there," she said.
"Isn't he the wandering Ayrab? And ain't you the good-natured little
wife to follow him about everywhere? How long you been here, Cherry?"

"I've been with Alix and Peter for--for several weeks," Cherry said,
uneasily. Her eyes met Peter's, and he conveyed reassurance to her with
a look.

"When you going back, dear?" Mrs. North asked, with so shrewd a glance
from Cherry's exquisite rosy face to Peter's that he felt a fresh pang
of suspicion. She HAD seen something----

"Why, I've been rather--rather kept here by the--the law-suit, haven't
I, Peter?" Cherry explained. "But I expect to go as soon as it's all
settled! Here's Alix," she said, gladly, as Alix came downstairs with
an old kodak album in her hands.

"Look, Cherry--I'd forgotten this!" Alix said, in deep amusement,
holding out the book. But she immediately put it aside to greet the old
friend.

"I'll bet you three are having real good times!" Mrs. North said, with
a curious look from one to the other.

"You know what I hope," Alix told her, "is that Cherry and Martin will
always keep the old place open now. They could get a Chinese boy for
very little to keep it in order, and then, you see, with all Martin's
moving about, she'd always have headquarters here. And I don't believe
Cherry'll ever love another place as she does the valley--will you,
Sis?" Alix ended, eagerly. Cherry met the arm her sister linked around
her, half-way, and gave her a troubled smile.

And yet a few moments later, when some quest took Peter suddenly from
the group, she watched the shabby corduroy suit, the laced high boots,
and the black head touched with gray, disappear in the direction of the
kitchen with a tearing pain at her heart, and the words the other women
were saying hummed without meaning in her ears.

"When you three girls got started, you all went off together!" Mrs.
North commented. "I used to say I thought you girls never would
marry--you never seemed to take much interest in the men!"

"I never thought we'd marry!" Alix agreed, pleasantly. "Did you,
Kirschwasser?"

"I don't think I ever thought about it--much," Cherry said, rousing
herself from a musing mood.

"According to age," Alix pursued, in one of her absurdly argumentative
moments, "Anne should have married Peter, Cherry, Justin, and I,
Martin. But the truth is, we didn't seem to give the matter sufficient
thought!"

"Girls never do; it isn't expected!" Mrs. North said, with her
indulgent laugh, as they followed Peter into the empty kitchen which
smelled of dry woods and drains. Dust was thick on Hong's range, and
one of his old white aprons was flung limply across a chair. Cherry's
eyes were thoughtful, filled with a look of pain. It was true; girls
didn't think anything about it, it wasn't expected of them. And yet, in
these very rooms, her father had urged her to consider; consideration
simply wasn't in that feather-brained little head of hers in those
days. Words seemed to have no meaning, or were transmuted into
different meanings by Martin Lloyd's voice. Her father had asked her to
wait, wait until she was nineteen! Nineteen had seemed old then. She
had felt that at nineteen she would have merely delayed the great joy
of life for nothing; at nineteen she would be only so much older, so
much more desperately bent upon this marriage.

And Peter was there then, was coming and going, advising and teasing
her--so near, so accessible, loving her even then, had she but known
it! That engagement might as easily--and how much more wisely!--have
been with Peter; the presents, the gowns, the wedding would have been
the same, to her childish egotism; the rest how different! The rest
would have been light instead of darkness, joy instead of pain, dignity
and development and increasing content instead of all the months of
restless criticism and doubt and disillusionment. The very scene here,
with Mrs. North and Alix, might easily have been, with Cherry as the
wife of Peter, Cherry as her sister's hostess, in the mountain cabin--

At the thought her heart suffocated her. She stood dazedly looking out
of the old kitchen window, and her senses swam in a sudden spasm of
pain.

And Alix? Well, Alix might have been Mrs. Lloyd. Martin had told her
more than once that he had "a crush on Alix, right off the bat!" And
Alix had liked him, too--any girl would like any man under the same
circumstances of age and environment. Alix would have made Martin a
better wife; she would have loved the mining towns, the muddy railroad
stations, and the odd women. She would have had her dogs, perhaps a
child or two now. Anyway, ran Cherry's thoughts, she would have had the
old home now, and that, to Alix, would have meant a very triumph of
joy. She would have come to stay with Peter and Cherry while it was put
in order; she would have revelled in cows and ducks and dogs here.

"Cherry, child, come and lend us a hand!" Peter said. They were trying
to push aside the ice-box that blocked the unlocked kitchen door.
Cherry went to them at once; the little word "child" danced in her
heart all day, and warmed it when she was lying wakeful and restless
deep into the summer night.

CHAPTER XVI

"You and I must go away!" said Peter. "I can't stand it. I love you. I
love you so dearly, Cherry. I can't think of anything else any more.
It's like a fever--it's like a sickness. I'm never happy, any more,
unless my arms are about you. Will you let me take you somewhere, where
we can be happy together?"

Cherry turned her confident, childish face toward him; her lashes
glittered, but she smiled.

"I love you, Peter!" she said. And the words, sounding softly through
the silence of the garden, died away on the warm night air like music.

It was night, the third night of the harvest moon. Through the branches
of the oak tree under which they were sitting blots of silver were
falling; between them the shadows were inky black. The grass was a
sheen of pearly light, the little cabin was like an enchanted dwelling,
wreathed with flowers, and steeped in moonshine. Toward the ocean, over
the moon-flooded ridge, a great fold of creamy fog was silently
pushing, and Cherry had a scarf of creamy lace caught about her
shoulders. Her coil of corn-coloured hair was loosened; she and Peter
had been moving geranium slips all afternoon, and at supper-time, when
a telephone message from Alix had advised them that she was obliged to
stay in town to dine with an exacting old family friend, they had
parted only to bathe and change, before sitting down for dinner in the
sunset beauty of the porch.

It had been a memorable meal, an hour always to have its place in their
hearts. In the two weeks since the day at the old house they had not
chanced to be often alone, and to-night, for the first time, Cherry
admitted that she could fight no longer. A few days before she had
again gone to the dentist, and again had waited for Peter at the great
hotel. But on this occasion he had not known of her engagement in town,
and had lunched elsewhere, so that Cherry had waited, growing weary,
headachy, and heartsick as the slow moments went their way. Peter,
happening to telephone to Alix, at about two o'clock, had learned that
Cherry was in the city, and hanging up the receiver, had sat wrapped in
agitated thought for a few minutes before rushing to the hotel on the
desperate hazard of finding her there.

The sight of the little patient figure, the irradiation of her face, as
they met, the ecstasy of delight with which their hands were joined,
and the flood of joy in their hearts, as he took her to tea, was
illuminating to them both. Cherry had spent two long hours waiting only
for the sight of that eager, limping, straight-shouldered form, and
Peter had experienced enough anguish as he sped to find her to tear the
last deception away.

To-night they talked as lovers, his arm about the soft little clinging
figure, her small, firm fingers tight in his own. He had squared about
on the great log that was their seat so that his ardent eyes were
closer to her; the world held nothing but themselves. It was eight
o'clock.

"So this is the thing that was waiting for us all these years, Cherry,
ever since the time you and Alix used to dam my brook and climb my oak
trees!"

"I never dreamed of it!" Cherry said, with wonder in her tone.

"If we had dreamed of it--" Peter began, and stopped.

"Ah, if we had, it would all be different," Cherry said, with a look of
pain. "That's the one thing I can't bear to think of!"

"What is?" he asked, watching the lovely face that was only dimly
visible in the moonlight.

"Oh, that it all might have been so simple--so easy and right!" the
girl answered. "That we might have been so happy instead of so sad--"

"It makes you sad, dear?"

"Peter, how could it make me anything else? Why, what can come of it?"
Cherry asked, sorrowfully. "I cannot stay on here, now. I cannot--" She
freed herself from his arms, and walked away from him restlessly
through the moonshine, twisting her arms above her head. "I cannot go
back to Martin!" he heard her whisper, in an agony. "I can't leave
you--I can't leave you!"

"Shall we go away?" Peter asked, simply, when she stopped at the great
stone that Alix, for the view it commanded, had christened Sunrise
Rock. Cherry dropped down upon it, facing away from him across the soft
green luminous light of the valley.

"Go where?" she asked.

"Go anywhere!" he answered. "We have money enough; we can leave Alix
rich--she will still have her cabin and her dogs and the life she
loves. But there are other tiny places, Cherry; there are little cabins
in Hawaii, there are Canadian villages--Cherry, there are thousands of
places in the south of France where we might live for years and never
be questioned, and never be annoyed."

"France!" she whispered, and the downcast face he was watching so
eagerly was thoughtful. "How could we go," she breathed. "You first,
and then I? To meet somewhere?"

"We would have to go together," he decided, swiftly. "Everyone must
know, dear; you realize that?"

Wide-eyed, she was staring at him as if spellbound by some new hope;
now she shrugged her shoulders in careless disdain.

"That isn't of any consequence!"

"You don't feel it so!" He sat down beside her, and again they locked
hands.

"Not that part," she answered, simply. "I mind--Alix," she added,
thoughtfully.

"Yes, I mind Alix!" he admitted.

"But the injury is done to Alix now," Cherry said, slowly. "Now it is
too late to go back! You and I couldn't--we couldn't deceive Alix here,
Peter," Cherry added, and as she turned to him he saw her thin white
blouse move suddenly with the quick rising of her heart. "That--that
would be too horrible! But I could take this love of ours away, leave
everything else behind, simply--simply recognize," stammered Cherry,
her lips beginning to tremble, "that it is bigger than ourselves, that
we can't help it, Peter. I'd fight it if I could," she added,
piteously, "I'd go away if I didn't know that no power on earth could
keep me from coming back!"

She buried her head on his shoulder, and he put his arm about her, and
there was utter silence over the great brooding mountain, and in the
valley brimming with soft moonshine, and in the garden.

"I believe that even Alix will understand," Peter said after awhile.
"She loves you and me better than any one else in the world; she is not
only everything that is generous, but she isn't selfish, she is the
busiest and the most sensible person I ever knew. I know--of course I
know it's rotten," he broke off in sudden despair, "but what I'm trying
to say is that Alix, of all people I know, is the one that will make
the least fuss about it--"

Cherry was staring raptly before her; now she grasped his hand and said
breathlessly:

"Oh, Peter, are we talking about it? Are we talking about our going
away, and belonging to each other?"

"What else?" he said, quick tears in his eyes.

"Oh, but I've been so unhappy, I've been so starved!" she whispered. "I
thought I wanted people--cities--I thought I wanted to go on the stage.
But it was only you that I wanted. Oh, Peter, what a life it will be!
The littlest cottage, the simplest life, and perhaps a beach or woods
to walk in--and always talking, reading, always together. I never want
to come back; I never want to see any one; I never want anything but
that."

"France it must be, I think," he said, "for then we can go about--no
one will know us---"

"But we will meet people we know in the trains, going," Cherry said,
suddenly. "I know what I am doing," she added, "but that would be so
hard, to have them identify us, perhaps come up to us, whisper and
point!"

"But why not go by sea?" he mused, "why not to Japan and through India,
and so on to France?"

"No!" she said quickly. "On a long sea-trip someone would surely know
us--isn't there some way we can get away, disappear as if we had never
been?"

"Cherry!" he said, kneeling before her in the wet grass. "You know what
it means!"

"It means you!" she answered, after a silence. She had laid her hands
softly about his neck, and her shining eyes were close to his.

"And you trust me?" he whispered. "You know that when I am free and you
are free--"

She put her fingers over his mouth.

"Peter! Haven't I known you ever since I was little enough to sit in
your lap and have you read 'Lady Jane' to me? It's so beautiful--it's
so wonderful--to love this way," she said, in her innocent, little-girl
voice, "that it seems to me the only thing in the world! I'd come to
you, Peter, if it meant shame and death and horror. It doesn't mean
that, it only means a man and a woman settling down somewhere in the
south of France, a big quiet man who limps a little, and a little
yellow-headed woman in blue smocks and silly-looking hats--"

"It means life, of course!" he interrupted her. "The hour that makes
you mine, Cherry, will be the exquisite hour of my whole life!"

They were silent for a while, and below them the white moonlight
deepened and brightened and swam like an enchantment.

"If you will face it," Peter said, presently, "I will give every
instant of my life to you!"

"I know you will," she said, dreamily.

"There will be no coming back, Cherry."

"Oh, I know that!"

"There can't ever be--there mustn't be--you've thought of that?" he
said, uncertainly. In the curious, unreal light that flooded the world,
he saw her turn, and caught the gleam of her surprised eyes.

"You mean children--a child?" she said, surprisedly. "Why not, Peter?"
she added, tightening her fingers, "what could be more wonderful than
that we should have a child? Can you imagine a happier environment for
a child than that little sunshiny, woodsy beach cottage; can't you see
the little figure--the two or three little figures!--scampering ahead
of us through the country roads, or around the fire? Oh, I can," said
Cherry, her extraordinary voice rich and sweet with longing, "I can!
That would be motherhood, Peter, that wouldn't be like having a baby
whose father one didn't--one COULDN'T love, marriage or no marriage!"

And as he watched, amazed at the change that love had brought to quiet,
little inarticulate Cherry, she added, earnestly:

"I've been thinking how BITTER it was, Peter, to have the greatest
thing in life come to us this way, but just lately--just this last hour
it's come to me that it is right--it's best!--to have it so. We give
all the world up, and we get only each other, and yet how little it
seems to give, and how much to get! Why, every hour of it, every minute
will hold more joy than we've ever known! I couldn't," she said,
suddenly grave, "I couldn't take you from any one who loved you as I
do; I couldn't hurt any one, to be happy. But Alix will forgive us;
you'll see she will!"

"Alix--I know her!--will only be sorry for me," Cherry mused. "She'll
only think me mad to disgrace the good name of Strickland; she'll think
we're both crazy. Perhaps she'll plunge into the orphanage work, or
perhaps she'll go on here, gardening, playing with Buck, raising
ducks--she says herself that she has never known what love means--says
it really meaning it, yet as if the whole subject was a joke--a
weakness!"

"I believe she will forgive us, for she is the most generous woman in
the world," Peter said, slowly. "Anyway--we can't stop now! We can't
stop now! It will take me only a few days now to close everything up,
to arrange matters so that she shall have plenty of money, and so that
I can carry on the affairs of my mother's estate at long range. Spencer
will attend to the rents, mail me quarterly checks; the whole thing is
simple. And I will let you know--"

"It all seems so unreal!" Cherry said, with her heart beginning to
hammer with excitement. "It doesn't seem as if it was you and me,
Peter. I shall not need a trunk; I shall buy new things--it will be a
new life---" "There is the steamer line that goes to Los Angeles,"
Peter mused. "Yes--I believe that is the solution," he added, with a
brightening face. "Nobody you know goes there on it; it leaves daily at
eleven, and gets into Los Angeles the following morning. From there---"

"I don't know ANYBODY there!" Cherry said, eagerly.

"You wouldn't see anybody anyway. From there we can get a drawing-room
to New Orleans; that's only a day and a half more; and we can keep to
ourselves if by any unlucky chance there should be any one we know on
the train--"

"Which isn't likely!"

"Which isn't likely! Then at New Orleans we go either to the Zone, or
to South America, or to any one of the thousand places--New York, if we
like, by water. By that time we will be lost as completely as if we had
dropped into the sea. I'll see about reservations--the thing is, you're
too pretty to go quite unnoticed!" he added, ruefully.

He saw a smile flicker on her face in the moonlight, but when she
spoke, it was with almost tearful gravity:

"You arrange it, Peter, and somehow I'll go. I'll write Alix--I'll tell
her that where she's sane, I'm mad, and where she's strong, I'm weak!
And we'll weather it, dear, and we'll find ourselves somewhere, alone,
with all the golden, beautiful future before us. But, Peter, until this
part of it's over we mustn't be alone again--you mustn't kiss me again!
Will you promise me?"

As stirred as she was, he gathered her little fingers together, and
kissed them.

"I'll promise anything!"

"I'll make it up to you," Cherry said, with a sort of feverish
weariness. "I'm all confused and frightened now; I only want it
somehow--somehow, to be over! I want you to take me away somewhere,"
she whispered, with the hands he was clasping resting on his breast,
and her flowerlike face raised to his, "take me somewhere, and take
care of me! I only want you!"

"Cherry, my darling--my dearest!" Peter said. "I will take care of you.
Only trust me for a few days more, and we will be away from it all. And
now you put it all out of your mind, and run in and go to bed. You're
exhausted, and if Alix gets the eight o'clock train she will be here in
a few minutes. I'll wander down the road a little way, and meet the car
if she drives it up."

"Good-night!" she breathed, and he saw the white gown flicker against
the soft light on the lawn, and saw the black shadow creeping by it,
before she mounted the porch steps, and was gone.

CHAPTER XVII

Swept along by a passionate excitement that seemed actually to consume
her, Cherry lived through the next three days. Alix noticed her mood,
and asked her more than once what caused it. Cherry would press a hot
cheek to hers, smile with eyes full of pain, and flutter away. She was
well, she was quite all right, only she--she was afraid Martin would
summon her soon--and she didn't want to go to him--!

Alix was puzzled, watching her sister with anxious eyes. The cleaning
and refurnishing of the old home was proceeding rapidly, and Alix
feared that the constant memory of the old times would be too much for
Cherry. She tried to induce her to rest, to spend this morning or that
afternoon in the hammock, but Cherry gently but irresistibly refused.
Her one hope was to be busy, to tire her brain and body before night.

Suspecting something gravely amiss, Alix tried to win her confidence
regarding Martin. But briefly, quickly, and with a sort of affectionate
and apologetic impatience, Cherry refused to discuss him.

"I shall not go back to him!" she said, breathing hard, and with the
air of being more absorbed in what she was doing than what she was
saying. She and Alix were dusting the books in their father's old
library, and arranging them on the shelves, on a quiet September
morning.

"But, Cherry, dear, you were saying yesterday that you dreaded his
sending for you!" Alix said, in a troubled surprise.

"Yes, I know I was!" Cherry admitted, quickly.

"But did you mean that you are really going to leave him?" the older
sister questioned. And as Cherry was silent she repeated: "Are you
going to leave him, dear?"

"I don't know what I'm going to do!" Cherry half sobbed.

"But, dearest--dearest, you're only twenty-four; don't you think you
might feel better about it as time goes on?" Alix urged. "Now that the
money is all yours, Cherry, and you can have this nice home to come to
now and then, isn't it different?"

Cherry, an old volume in her hand, was looking at her steadily.

"You don't understand, Sis!" she said.

"I understand that you don't love Martin," Alix said, perplexed. "But
can't people who don't love each other live together in peace?" she
added, with a half smile.

"N-n-not as man and wife!" Cherry stammered.

Alix sat back on her heels, in the ungraceful fashion of her girlhood,
and shrugged her shoulders.

"Think of the people who are worrying themselves sick over bills, or
sick wives, or children to bring up!" she suggested, hopefully. "My
Lord, if you have enough money, and food, and are young, and well--!"

"Yes, but, Alix," Cherry argued, eagerly, "I'm NOT well when I'm
unhappy. My heart is like lead all the time; I can't seem to breathe!
People--isn't it possible that people are different about that?" she
asked, timidly.

"I suppose they are!" Alix conceded, thoughtfully. "Anyway, look at all
the fusses in history," she added, carelessly, "of GRANDE PASSIONS, and
murders, and elopements, and the fate of nations--resting on just the
fact that a man and woman hated each other too much, or loved each
other too much! There must be something in it that I don't understand.
But what I DO understand," she added, after a moment, when Cherry,
choked with emotion, was silent, "is that Dad would die of grief if he
knew you were unhappy, that your life was all broken up in
disappointment and bitterness!"

"But is that my fault!" Cherry exclaimed, with sudden tears.

Alix, after watching her for a troubled minute, went to her, and put
her arm about her. "Don't cry, Cherry!" she pleaded, sorrowfully.

Cherry, regaining self-control, resumed her work silently, with an
occasional, sudden sigh. Alix, clapping the heavy covers of a
leatherbound volume in Buck's inquisitive nose, presently laughed gaily
as he sneezed and pawed.

She had opened the subject with reluctance; now she realized that they
had again reached a blank wall.

Three days after their talk in the moonlit garden Peter found chance to
speak alone to Cherry.

"Are you ready?" he asked.

"Quite!" she said, raising blue eyes to his.

"What about your suitcase?"

"I took it into San Francisco yesterday; Alix went in early, and I
followed at noon. It's checked in the ferry building, waiting."

"It's to-morrow then, Cherry!" he said.

"To-morrow!" He saw the colour ebb from her face as she echoed him.
This was already late afternoon; perhaps her thoughts raced ahead to
to-morrow afternoon at this time when they two would be leaning on the
rail of the little steamer, gazing out over the smooth, boundless blue
of the Pacific, and alone in the world.

"To-morrow you will be mine!" he said.

"That's all I think of," she answered. And now the colour came up in a
splendid wave of flame, and the face that she turned toward his was
radiant with proud surrender.

He told her the number of the dock; they discussed trains.

"We sail at eleven," said Peter, "but I shall be there shortly after
ten. I'll have the baggage on board, everything ready; you only have to
cross the gangplank. You have your baggage check; give it to me."

They were waiting in the car while Alix marketed; Cherry opened her
purse and gave him the punched cardboard.

"I'll tell Alix that I have a last dentist appointment at half-past
ten," she said. "If she goes in with me, we'll go to the very door. But
she says she can't come in to-morrow, anyway. I'll write her to-night,
and drop the letter on the way to the boat."

"Better wait until we are in Los Angeles," he said, pondering. "I'm
writing, too, of course. I'm simply saying that it is one of the big
things that come into people's lives and that one can't combat. Perhaps
some day--but I can't look forward; I can't tell what the future holds.
I only know that we belong to each other, and that life might as well
be ended as love!"

"To-morrow, then!" was Cherry's only answer. "I'm glad it's so soon."

"Good-bye!" said Cherry, leaning over the side of the car to kiss her
sister. Alix received the kiss, smiled, and stretched in the sun.

"Heavenly day to waste in the city!" said Alix.

"I know!" Cherry said, nervously. She had been so strangely nervous and
distracted in manner all morning that Alix had more than once asked her
if there was anything wrong. Now she questioned her again.

"You mustn't mind me!" Cherry said, with a laugh. "I'm desperately
unhappy," she said, her eyes watering. "And sometimes I think of
desperate remedies, that's all."

"I'd do anything in the world to help you, Cerise!" Alix said,
sympathetically.

"I know you would, Sis! I believe," Cherry said, trembling, "that
there's nothing you wouldn't give me!"

"That's easily said," Alix answered, carelessly, "for I don't get fond
of things, as you do! My dear, I'd go off with Martin to Mexico in a
minute. I mean it! I don't care a whoop where I live, if only people
are happy. I'd work my hands to the bone for you--as a matter of fact,
I do work 'em to the bone," she added, laughing, as she looked at the
hands that were stained and rough from gardening.

"How about Buck?" Cherry said, as the dog leaped to his place on the
front seat, and licked his mistress's ear.

Alix embraced him lovingly.

"Well--if he wanted to go with you!" she conceded, unwillingly. "But he
wouldn't!" she added, quickly. Cherry, going to the train, gave her an
April smile, and as she took her seat and the train drew on its way, it
seemed to her suddenly that she might indeed meet Peter, but it would
only be to tell him that what they had planned was impossible.

But on the deck of the Sausalito steamer, dreaming in the sunshine of
the soft, lazy autumn day, her heart turned sick with longing once
more. Alix was forgotten, everything was forgotten except Peter. His
voice, his tall figure, erect, yet moving with the little limp she knew
so well, came to her thoughts. She thought of herself on the other
steamer, only an hour from now, safe in his care, Martin forgotten, and
all the perplexities and disappointments of the old life forgotten, in
the flood of new security and joy. Los Angeles--New Orleans--France--it
mattered not where they wandered, they might well lose the world, and
the world them, from to-day on.

"So that is to be my life--one of the blamed and ignored women?" Cherry
mused, leaning on the rail, and watching the plunge of the receding
water. "Like the heroines of half the books--only it always seemed so
bold and so frightful in books! But to me it just seems the most
natural thing in all the world. I love Peter, and he loves me, and the
earth is big enough to hide us, and that's all there is to it. Anyway,
right or wrong, I can't help it," she finished, rejoicing to find
herself suddenly serene and confident, as the boat made the slip, and
the passengers streamed downstairs and so across the ferry place and
into the city.

It was twenty minutes past ten, a warm, sweet morning, with great
hurrying back and forth at the ferry, women climbing to the open seats
of the cable-cars, pinning on their violets or roses as they climbed.
In the air was the pleasant mingling of the scents of roasting coffee,
salt bay-water, and softening tar in the paving, that is native only to
San Francisco. Cars clanged about the circle, hummed their way up into
the long vista of Market Street, disturbing great flights of gulls that
were picking dropped oats from the very feet of feeding horses.

Cherry sped through it all, beside herself now with excitement and
strain, only anxious to have the great hands of the clock drop more
speedily from minute to minute, and so round out the terrible hour that
joined the old life to the new. She was hurrying blindly toward the
docks of the Los Angeles Line, absorbed in her one whirling thought,
when somebody touched her arm, and a voice, terrifyingly unexpected and
yet familiar, addressed her, and a hand was laid on her arm.

In utter confusion she looked up. It was Martin who had stopped her.

CHAPTER XVIII

For a few dreadful seconds a sort of vertigo seized Cherry and she was
unable to collect her thoughts or to speak even the most casual words
of greeting. She had been so full of her extraordinary errand that she
was bewildered and sick at its interruption, her heart thundered, her
throat was choked, and her knees shook beneath her. Where was she--what
was known--how much had she betrayed--Her thoughts jumbled together in
a tangle of horrified questioning.

Gasping, trying to smile, she looked up at him, while the ferry place
whirled about her, and pulses drummed in her ears. She had
automatically given him her hand; now he kissed her.

"Hello, Cherry, where you going?" for the third time.

"I came into town to shop," she faltered.

"You what?" She had not really been intelligible, and she felt it, with
a pang of fright. He must not suspect--the steamer was there, only a
short block away; Peter might pass them; a chance word might be
fatal--he must not suspect--

"I'm shopping!" she said distinctly, with dry lips. And she managed to
smile.

"Well," Martin said, smiling in turn, "surprised to see me?"

"Oh, Martin--" said her fluttered voice. Even in the utter panic of
heart and soul she knew that for safety's sake she must find his vanity.

"I'm going to tell you something that will surprise you," he said. "I'm
through with the Red Creek people!"

"Martin!" Cherry enunciated, almost voicelessly.

"You remember I wrote you that they fired Mason, and that I was doing
his work and mine, too?"

"I--I remember!" Cherry, seized by deadly nausea and chill, looked from
a flower vendor to a newsboy, looked at the cars, the people--she must
not faint. She must not faint.

"Well--but where are you going? Home?"

"I was going to the dentist a minute, but it's not important." They had
turned and were walking across to the ferry. She knew that there was no
way in which she might escape him. "What did you say?" she said.

"I asked you when the next boat left for Mill Valley?"

"We can--go--find out." Cherry's thoughts were spinning. She must warn
Peter somehow. It was twenty minutes of eleven by the ferry clock.
Twenty minutes of eleven. In twenty minutes the boat would sail. She
thought desperately of the women's waiting-room upstairs; she might
plead the necessity of telephoning from it. But it had but one door,
and Martin would wait at that door. The glow of meeting had already
faded from his face, but he was loitering by her side, quite as a
matter of course.

Suddenly she realized that her only hope of warning Peter was to send a
messenger. But if Martin should chance to connect her neighbourhood
with the boat, when he met her, and her sending of a message to Peter
here--

"I think there's a boat at eleven something," she said, collectedly.
"Suppose you go and find out?"

She glanced toward the entrance of the Sausalito waiting-room, a
hundred yards away, and a mad hope leaped in her heart. If he turned
his back on her--

"What are you going to do?" he asked, somewhat surprised.

"I ought to telephone Alix!" Her despair lent her wit. If he went to
the ticket office, and she into a telephone booth, she might escape him
yet! While he dawdled here, minutes were flying, and Peter was watching
every car and every passer-by, torn with the same agony that was
tearing her. "If you'll go find out the exact time and get tickets,"
she said, "I'll telephone Alix."

"Tickets?" he echoed, with all Martin's old, maddening slowness.
"Haven't you got a return ticket?"

"I have mileage!" she blundered.

"Oh, then I'll use your mileage!" Martin said. "Telephone," he added,
nodding toward a row of booths, "no hurry; we've got piles of time!"

She remembered that he liked a masculine assumption of easiness where
all trains, tickets, railroad connections, and transit business of any
sort were concerned. He liked to loiter elaborately while other people
were running, liked to pull out his big watch and assure her that they
had all the time in the world. She tried to call a number, left the
booth, paid a staring girl, and rejoined him.

"Busy!" she reported.

"I was just thinking," Martin said, "that we might stay in town and go
to the Orpheum; how about it? Do we have to have Peter and Alix?"

Cherry flushed, angered again, in the well-remembered way, under all
her fright and stir. Her voice had its old bored note.

"Well, Martin, I've been their guest for two months!"

"I'd just as soon have them!" Martin conceded, indifferently.

But the diverted thought had helped Cherry, irritation had nerved her,
and the reminder of Martin's old, trying stupidities had lessened her
fear of him.

"I've got to send a telegram-for Alix," she said.

"What about?" he asked, less curious than ill-bred.

"Good-bye to some people who are sailing!" Cherry answered, calmly.
"Only don't mention it to Alix, because I promised it would go
earlier!" she added.

"I saw the office back here," he told her. They went to it together,
and he was within five feet of her while she scribbled her note.

"Martin met me. Nothing wrong. We are returning to Mill Valley. C. L."
She glanced at her husband; he was standing in the doorway of the
little office, smoking. Quickly she addressed the envelope. "DON'T READ
THAT NAME OUT LOUD," she said, softly but very slowly and distinctly,
to the girl at the desk. She put a gold piece down on the note. "Keep
the change, and for God's sake get that to the Harvard, sailing from
Dock 67, before eleven!" she said.

The girl, who had been pencilling a large "10:46" on the envelope,
looked up in surprise; but rose immediately to the occasion. Cherry's
beauty, her agonized eyes and voice, were enough to awaken her sense of
the dramatic. A sharp rap of the clerk's pencil summoned a boy.

"George, there's a dollar in that for you if you deliver it before
eleven to the Harvard!" said she. The boy seized it, stuck it in his
hat, and fled.

"And now for the boat!" Cherry said, rejoining Martin, and speaking in
almost her natural voice. They went back to the Sausalito ferry
entrance again, and this time telephoned Alix in real earnest, and
presently found themselves on the upper deck of the boat, bound for the
valley.

Until now, and in occasional rushes of terror still, she had been
absorbed in the hideous necessity of deceiving, of covering her own
traces, of anticipating and closing possible avenues of betrayal. But
now Cherry began to breathe more easily, and to feel rising about her,
like a tide, the half-forgotten consciousness of her relationship with
this man in the boldly-checked suit who was sitting beside her. She had
thought to escape the necessity of telling him that she was not willing
to return to him; she had been wrapped in dreams so great and so
wonderful that the thought of his anger and resentment had been as
nothing to her. But she had all that to face now.

She had it to face immediately, too. She knew that every hour of
postponement would cost her fresh humiliations and difficulties. He did
not love her, but he was quietly taking her for granted again, and
until she could summon courage to speak to him with utter frankness and
finality, he would of course claim his position as her husband.

The thought threw her into a nervous agitation almost as frightful as
that of meeting him had been, and again she felt the dizzy faintness
and sickness of that moment.

The trip from San Francisco to Sausalito occupies exactly half an hour;
after that there was a train trip of twenty minutes. Cherry knew that
what was done must be done in that time. In Mill Valley Alix would meet
them, perhaps willing to take any cue that Cherry gave her, as to their
relationship, but of course anxious to have that relationship as
pleasant and normal and friendly as possible.

Her head was still rocking from the shock of the experiences of the
last hour and the last fortnight. Even had she met Peter it might have
been to yield with a sort of collapse to mental and physical
exhaustion. But to be forced to make a fresh effort now, one of the
crucial and fearful struggles of a lifetime, to present her case to
Martin now, and force him to her viewpoint, was almost impossible.

Yet Cherry knew that it must be done, and as the boat slipped smoothly
past the island that roughly marked the halfway point, she gathered all
her forces for the trial.

Martin was meanwhile energetically presenting to her the arguments that
had convinced him that he must give up the Mexico position. She vaguely
appreciated that someone named Murry was a traitor, and that the "whole
bunch" were "rubes," but her mind was busy with its own problem all the
while, and the one distinct impression she had from Martin was the
appalling one that he did not dream that she had decided to sever their
union completely and finally.

"Well, how's the valley? Bore you to death?" he interrupted the flow of
his own topic to ask carelessly.

"Oh, no, Martin!" she quivered. "I--I love it there! I always loved it!"

"Alix is a fine girl--she's a nice girl," Martin conceded. "But I can't
go Peter! He may be all right, all that lah-di-dah and Omar Khayyam and
Browning stuff may be all right, but I don't get it!" And he yawned
contentedly in the sunshine.

After a few seconds he gave Cherry an oblique glance, expecting her
resentment. But she was thinking too deeply even to have heard him. Her
mind was working as desperately as a caged animal, her thoughts
circling frantically, trying windows, walls, and doors in the prison in
which she found herself, mad for escape.

She blamed herself bitterly now for allowing him, in the surprise and
fear she felt, in the shock of their unexpected meeting, to arrange
this domestic and apparently reconciled return to the valley house. Had
she known beforehand that they were to meet she would have steeled
herself to suggest to him coldly that they lunch somewhere, and talk.
She could imagine now the quiet significance with which she would have
stressed the phrase, "Martin, I want to talk to you."

Better still, she would have anticipated that meeting with a letter
that would have warned him that his position as a husband was changed.
But it was too late now! Too late for anything but a bald and brave and
cruel half-hour that should, at any cost, sunder them.

Quick upon the thought came another: what should she and Peter plan
now? For to suppose that their lives were to be guided back into the
old hateful channel by this mere mischance was preposterous. Within a
few days their interrupted trip must be resumed, perhaps
to-morrow--perhaps this very night they would manage it successfully.
Alix was unsuspicious, Martin utterly unconcerned, and perhaps it would
be even easier to do now, than when Alix must at once communicate with
Martin, and perhaps bring him away from his work, to adjust life to the
new conditions.

But meanwhile, until she could see Peter alone, there was Martin to
deal with, Martin who was leaning forward, vaingloriously reciting to
her long speeches he had made to this superior or that.

"Martin," she said, impetuously interrupting him, "I've got to talk to
you! I've meant to write it--so many times, I've had it in my mind ever
since I left Red Creek!"

"Shoot!" Martin said, with his favourite look of indulgent amusement.

But she knew the little twitch to his lips that was neither indulgent
nor amused.

"There are marriages that without any fault on either side are a
mistake," Cherry began, "any contributory fault, I mean--"

"Talk United States!" Martin growled, smiling, but on guard.

"Well, I think our marriage was one of those!" Cherry said.

"What have you got to kick about?" Martin asked, after a pause.

"I'm not kicking!" Cherry answered, with quick resentment. "But I wish
I had words to make you realize how I feel about it!"

Martin looked gloomily up at her, and shrugged.

"This is a sweet welcome from your wife!" he observed. But as she
regarded him with troubled and earnest eyes, perhaps her half-forgotten
beauty made an unexpected appeal to him, for he turned toward her and
eyed her with a large tolerance. "What's the matter, Cherry?" he asked.
"It doesn't seem to me that you've got much to kick about. Haven't I
always taken pretty good care of you? Didn't I take the house and move
the things in; didn't I leave you a whole month, while I ate at that
rotten boarding-house, when your father died; haven't I let you
have--how long is it?--seven weeks, by George, with your sister?"

It poured out too readily to be unpremeditated; Cherry recognized the
tones of his old arraigning voice. He had brooded over his grievances.
He felt himself ill-treated.

"Now you come in for this money," he began. But she interrupted him
hotly:

"Martin, you know that is not true!"

"Isn't it true that the instant you can take care of yourself you begin
to talk about not being happy, and so on!" he asked, without any
particular feeling. "You bet you do! Why, I never cared anything about
that money, you never heard me speak of it. I always felt that by the
time the lawyers and the heirs and the witnesses got through, there
wouldn't be much left of it, anyway!"

Too rich in her new position of the woman beloved by Peter to quarrel
with Martin in the old unhappy fashion, Cherry laid an appealing hand
on his arm.

"I'm sorry to meet you with this sort of thing," she said, simply, "I
blame myself now for not writing you just how I've come to feel about
it! But I just want it SAID before we meet Alix--"

"Have what said?" he asked, surlily.

"Have it understood," she pursued, patiently, "that we must make some
arrangement for the future--things can't be as they were!"

"You've had it all your way ever since we were married," he began. "Now
you blame me--"

"I DON'T blame you, Martin!"

"Well, what do you want a divorce for, then?"

"I don't even say anything about a divorce," Cherry said, fighting for
time only. "But I can't go back!" she added, with a sudden force and
conviction that reached him at last.

"Why can't you?"

"Because you don't love me, Martin, and--you know it!--I don't love
you!"

"Well, but you can't expect the way we felt when we got married to last
forever," he said, clumsily. "Do you suppose other men and women talk
this way when the--the novelty has worn off?"

"I don't know how they talk. I only know how I feel!" Cherry said,
chilled by the old generalization.

Martin, who had stretched his legs to their length, crossed them at the
ankles, and shoved his hands deep into his pockets, staring at the
racing blue water with sombre eyes.

"What do you want?" he asked, heavily. "I want to live my own life!"
Cherry answered, after a silence during which her tortured spirit
seemed to coin the hackneyed phrase.

"That stuff!" Martin sneered, under his breath. "Well, all right, I
don't care, get your divorce!" he agreed, carelessly. "But I'll have
something to say about that, too," he warned her. "You can drag the
whole thing up before the courts if you want to--only remember, if you
don't like it much, YOU DID IT. It never occurred to me even to think
of such a thing! I've done my share in this business; you never asked
me for anything I could give you that you didn't get; you've never been
tied down to housework like other women; you're not raising a family of
kids--go ahead, tell every shop-girl in San Francisco all about it, in
the papers, and see how much sympathy you get!"

"Oh, you BEAST!" Cherry said, between her teeth, furious tears in her
eyes. The water swam in a blur of blue before her as they rose to go
downstairs at Sausalito. The boat had made the slip, and the few
passengers, at this quiet noontime, were drifting off.

Martin glanced at her with impatience. Her tears never failed to anger
him.

"Don't cry, for God's sake!" he said, nervously glancing about for
possible onlookers. "What do you want me to do? For the Lord's sake
don't make a scene until you and I have a chance to talk this over
quietly--"

Cherry's thoughts were with Peter. In her soul she felt as if his arm
was about her, as if she were pouring out to him the whole troubled
story, sure that he would rescue and console her. She had wiped her
eyes, and somewhat recovered calm, but she trusted herself only to
shrug her shoulder as she preceded Mart to the train.

There was time for not another word, for Alix suddenly took possession
of them. She had had time to bring the car all the six miles to
Sausalito, and meant to drive them direct to the valley from there.

She greeted Martin affectionately, although even while she did so her
eyes went with a quick, worried look to Cherry. They had been
quarrelling, of course--it was too bad, Alix thought, but her own
course was clear. Until she could take her cue from them, she must
treat them both with cheerful unconsciousness of the storm. She invited
Martin to share the driver's seat with her, pushing the resentful Buck
into the tonneau with Cherry.

Alix, in the months that she had not seen him, had had time to develop
a certain generous sympathy for Martin, but as she took the car swiftly
through the warm, sweet summer day, she began to realize afresh just
how serious Cherry's problem was. It was not merely that Martin chewed
a toothpick as he talked to her, and took out a pen-knife to trim a
finger-nail; it was not that he was somewhat vain, stupid, and
opinionated, for the minor social deficiencies might have been remedied
in a larger nature by an affectionate word, and there were times, Alix
felt, when the best of men are insistent upon perverse and perverted
views, and unashamed or unconscious of their limitations. Martin had
coarsened in the six years since they had first known him. There had
been something unspoiled, vigorous, and fresh about him then that was
gone now. Alix sensed that his associates in the mining towns in which
he had lived had been men and women of a low type. The defiling
influence had left its mark. Missing entertainment in his home, he had
sought it elsewhere.

But besides these things Martin had a certain complacency, an assurance
that would have been inexcusable even in great genius, a mental
arrogance that nothing in his life in the least degree warranted. He
made no slight effort to adapt himself to the atmosphere in which he
found his wife and her sister, interested himself for not one moment in
their concerns, put out no feelers toward the mood that might have made
him an agreeable addition to their group. He conceded nothing; he was
Martin Lloyd, mining engineer, philosopher, man of the world, and it
was for them to listen to him, admire him, and praise and tease and
flatter him in all he did. Humility and shyness were never a part of
Martin's nature, but to-day he was galled by his talk with Cherry, and
less inclined even than usual to abase himself.

"Does Peter let you drive the car on these mountain roads?" he demanded
of Alix.

"Oh, yes, indeed. I love to run the car!" she said, with a swift,
smiling glance.

"Well, you want to keep your eyes on the road," he warned her. "There's
nothing worries me like having a lady at the wheel," he went on,
good-naturedly, "that's the time I say my prayers!"

"Plenty of women running cars now, Martin!" Alix said, cheerfully,
wishing that Martin didn't always and infallibly nettle her.

"But it's no business for a woman," he assured her, in a suddenly
serious and confidential undertone. "No business for them! They haven't
the strength, in the first place, and they haven't--well, they're too
nervous, in the second. Mouse cross the road," said Martin, sucking in
deep breaths as he lighted a cigar, "and--whee! Over she goes into a
ditch. No," he said, kindly, "I'm a great friend of all the ladies, but
I think they make a mistake when they think they're men."

"Only one accident in ten is with a woman driver," Alix argued.

"That may be true, too," Martin conceded, largely. She knew that he was
drawing his words merely to cover any impression of being caught
unprepared. "That may be true, too. But don't you believe that half the
cases of women's accidents get into the courts," he added, knowingly.
"You bet your life they don't! You bet your sweet life they don't. Oh,
no--pretty girl smiles at the policeman--" He smoked a few seconds in
triumphant silence. "Why, you knew that, didn't you?" he asked, in
kindly patronage.

"I suppose so!" Alix said, briefly, after swallowing a more spirited
answer with a gulp.

"Oh, sure!" Martin agreed, in great content.

They reached the valley, and Martin was magnanimous about the delayed
lunch. Anything would do for him, he said, he was taking a couple of
days' holiday, and everything went. Kow was chopping wood after lunch,
and he sauntered out to the block with suggestions; Alix, laying a fire
for the evening, simply because she liked to do that sort of work, was
favoured with directions. Finally Martin pushed her aside.

"Here, let me do that," he said. "You'd have a fine fire here, at that
rate!"

Later he went down to the old house with them, to spend there an hour
that was trying to both women. It was almost in order now; Cherry had
pleased her simple fancy in the matter of hangings and papering, and
the effect was fresh and good. The kitchen smelled cleanly of white
paint, and the other rooms wore almost their old, hospitable aspect.

"Girls going to rent this?" Martin asked.

"Unless you and Cherry come live here," Alix said, boldly. He smiled
tolerantly.

"Why should we?"

"Well, why shouldn't you?"

"Loafing, eh?"

"No, not loafing. But you could transfer your work to San Francisco,
couldn't you?" Martin smiled a deep, wise, long-enduring smile.

"Oh, you'd get me a job, I suppose?" he asked. "I love the way you
women try to run things," he added, "but I guess I'll paddle my own
canoe for awhile longer!"

"There is no earthly reason why you shouldn't live here," Alix said,
pleasantly.

"There is no earthly reason why we should!" Martin returned. He was
annoyed by a suspicion that Alix and Cherry had arranged between them
to make this plan the alternative to a divorce. "To tell you the honest
truth, I don't like Mill Valley!"

Alix tasted despair. Small hope of preserving this particular
relationship. He was, as Cherry had said, "impossible."

"Well, we must try to make you like Mill Valley better!" she said, with
resolute good-nature. "Of course, it means a lot to Cherry and to me to
be near each other!"

"That may be true, too," Martin agreed, taking the front seat again for
the drive home. He told Cherry later that he liked Alix, and Alix was
interested enough in keeping him happy to deliberately play upon his
easily touched self-confidence. She humoured him, laughed at his jokes,
asked him the questions that he was able to answer, and loved to answer.

She was surprised at Cherry's passivity and silence, but Cherry was
wrapped in a sick and nervous dream, unable either to interpret the
present or face the future with any courage. Before luncheon he had
followed her into her room, and had put his arm about her. But she had
quietly shaken him off, with the nervous murmur: "Please--no, don't
kiss me, Martin!"

Stung, Martin had immediately dropped his arm, had shrugged his
shoulders indifferently, and laughed scornfully. Now he remarked to
Alix, with some bravado:

"You girls still sleeping out?"

"Oh, always--we all do!" Alix had answered, readily. "Peter has an
extra bunk on his porch, Cherry and I have my porch. But you can be out
or in, as you choose!"

Martin ventured an answer that made Cherry's eyes glint angrily, and
brought a quick, embarrassed flush to Alix's face. Alix did not enjoy a
certain type of joking, and she did not concede Martin even the ghost
of a smile. He immediately sobered, and remarked that he himself liked
to be indoors at night. His suitcase was accordingly taken into the
pleasant little wood-smelling room next to Peter's, where the autumn
sunlight, scented with the dry sweetness of mountain shrubs, was
streaming.

He began to play solitaire, on the porch table, at five, and Kow had to
disturb him to set it for dinner at seven. Alix was watering the
garden, Cherry was dressing. It was an exquisite hour of long shadows
and brilliant lights; bees from Alix's hives went to and fro, and the
air was full and fragrant, as if a golden powder had been scattered
through it.

Kow had put a tureen of soup on the table, and Alix had returned with
damp, clean hands and trimly brushed hair, for supper, when Peter came
up through the garden. Cherry had rambled off in the direction of the
barn a few moments before, but Martin had followed her and brought her
back, remarking that she had had no idea of the time, and was idly
watching Antone milking. She slipped into her place after they were all
eating, and hardly raised her eyes throughout the meal. If Alix
addressed her she fluttered the white lids as if it were an absolute
agony to look up; to Peter she did not speak at all. But to Martin she
sent an occasional answer, and when the conversation lagged, as it was
apt to do in this company, she nervously filled it with random remarks
infinitely less reassuring than silence.

"How long do we stay here?" Martin cautiously asked his wife, when
after dinner, Peter could be heard in the kitchen, interrogating Kow,
and when the drip and splash of Alix's hose was sounding steadily from
the other end of the garden.

"Stay here?" she echoed, at a loss.

"Yes," he answered, decidedly. "I can stand a little of it, but I don't
think much of this sort of life! I thought maybe we could all go into
town for dinner and the theatre to-morrow or Saturday. But on Monday
we'll have to beat it."

"Monday!" Cherry's heart bounded.

"My idea was, you to come up with me," Martin continued, "we'll see the
folks in Portland--"

"Martin, isn't it a mistake to go on pretending--" she began bitterly.
But Peter's voice, in the drawing room, interrupted her. "I'll let you
know--we'll talk about it!" she had time to say, hurriedly, before he
came out to them. He flung himself into a chair. Martin at once opened
a general conversation, in which Alix, still diligently watering, was
presently near enough to take part.

CHAPTER XIX

The evening dragged. Alix had suggested bridge, but Martin did not play
bridge. So she presently scattered anagrams over the table, reminding
Peter of some of their battles with word-making in the long winter
nights, and they had a half-hearted game, in which Martin showed no
interest at all, and Peter deliberately missed chances to score.

Alix glanced furtively at her wrist-watch; it was twenty minutes of
ten. As Martin flung himself into a chair beside the fire, and lighted
one of his strong cigars, she went to the piano, and began to ramble
through various songs, hoping that somebody would start to sing, or
suggest a favourite, or in some way help to lighten the dreadful
heaviness of the atmosphere.

Cherry and Peter, left at the table, did not speak to each other; Peter
leaned back in his chair, with a cigarette; Cherry dreamily pushed to
and fro the little wooden block letters.

But presently her heart gave a great plunge, and although she did not
alter her different attitude, or raise her eyes, her white hand moved
with directed impulse, and Peter's casual glance fell upon the word
"Alone."

When he laid his finished cigarette in the tray, it was to finger the
letters himself, in turn, and Cherry realized with a great thrill of
relief that he was answering her. Carelessly, and obliterating one word
before he began another, he formed the question: "My office to-morrow?"

"Martin always with me," Cherry spelled back. She did not glance at
Peter, but at Martin, who was watching the fire, and at Alix, whose
back was toward the room.

"Come on, have another game!" Peter asked, generally, while he spelled
quickly: "Will arrange sailing first possible day."

Alix, humming along with her song, said: "Wait a few minutes!" and
Martin glanced up to say, "No, I'm no good at that thing!"

Then Cherry and Peter were unobserved again, and she spelled "Mart goes
Monday. Plans to take me."

Peter had reached for a magazine; he whirled through the pages, and
yawned. Then he began to play with the anagrams again.

"Can you get away without him?" he spelled.

"How?" Cherry instantly asked. And as Peter's hands went on building a
little bridge of wooden letters, she went on: "Alix to train, Martin
with me to city, impossible."

"Give him the slip," Peter spelled. And after a pause he added, "Life
or death."

"Difficult to evade," Cherry spelled, wiping the words away one by one.

"Must wait--" Peter began. Alix, ending her song on a crash of chords,
came to the table, interrupting him. Cherry was now lazily reading a
magazine; Peter had built a little pen of tiny blocks.

"I'll go you!" Alix said, with spirit. But the game was rather a
languid one, nevertheless, and when it was over they gathered yawning
about the mantel, ready to disperse for the night.

"And to-morrow night we dine in town and go to the Orpheum?" Alix
asked, for the plan had been suggested at dinner-time.

"I'll blow you girls to any show you like," Martin offered. He took out
his big watch--Cherry remembered just how smoothly this watch always
seemed to slip in and out of his pocket--and smiled at them. "Ten
o'clock," he grinned. "I'll set up awhile longer, and have a look at
the evening papers."

"Well--" Peter conceded. Cherry was shocked by the sudden chill and
sternness of his face. Immediately, remarking that he was tired, he
went to his room. Cherry, with only a general good-night, also
disappeared, to find Alix arranging beds and pillows on their sleeping
porch.

"Oh, Alix--I'm so worried--I'm so sick with worry!" Cherry whispered.
Alix, sitting still in the circle of light thrown from the reading lamp
light, over her bed, nodded, with a stricken face. "He won't listen to
me," said Cherry. "He won't hear of a divorce!"

"I know!" Alix said, distressedly.

"But what shall I do--I can't go with him!" Cherry protested.

Alix was silent.

"What shall I do?" Cherry pleaded again.

"Why, I don't see what else you CAN do, but go with him!" Alix said, in
a troubled voice. "I should think that no man would want his wife,
knowing that she didn't want to be with him! And I should think that to
leave you here, with enough money to live on, and your own old home,
would suit him better than to drag you--" She sighed. "But if it
doesn't," she finished, "of course it doesn't alter your obligation, in
a way. You ARE his wife. 'For better or worse, for richer or poorer,
till death---'"

It was said so kindly, with Alix's simple and embarrassed fashion of
giving advice, that poor Cherry could not resent it. She could only bow
her head desolately upon her knees, as she sat, child-fashion, in her
bed, and cry.

"A nice mess I've made of my life!" she sobbed. "I've made a nice mess
of it! I wish--oh, my God, how I wish I was dead!"

"My own life has been so darned easy," Alix mused, in a cautious
undertone, sitting, fully dressed, on the side of her own bed, and
studying her sister with pitying eyes. "I've often wondered if I could
buck up and get through with it if some of that sort of thing had come
to me! I don't know, of course, but it seems to me that I'd say: 'Who
loses his life shall gain it!' and I'd stand anything--people and
places I hated, loneliness and poverty--the whole bag of tricks! I
think I would. I mean I'd read the Bible and Shakespere, and enjoy my
meals, and have a garden--" Her voice sank. "I know it's terribly hard
for you, Cherry!" she ended, suddenly pitiful.

Cherry had stopped crying, dried her eyes, and had reached resolutely
for the book that was waiting on the little shelf above the porch bed.

"You're bigger than I am," she said, quietly. "Or else I'm so made that
I suffer more! I wish I could face the music. But I can't do anything.
Of course, just--just loathing some things about a man isn't valid
cause for divorce, I know that. But I'd rather live with a man that
drank, and stole, and beat me--I'd rather he should disgrace me before
the whole world, and drag me to prison with him, than to feel as I
feel! I would, Alix. I tell you--" Her voice was rising, but suddenly
she interrupted herself, and spoke in a lifeless and apologetic tone:
"I'm sorry," she said. "One knows of unhappy marriages, everywhere,
without quite fancying just what a horrible tragedy an unhappy marriage
is! Don't mind me, Alix. The Mill Valley Zeus will have an item in it
this week that Mr. and Mrs. Martin Lloyd have gone to visit relatives