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.