“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.