“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—­