“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 in Portland, Oregon, and nobody’ll know but what we’re the happiest couple in the world—­and perhaps we are!”

Alix laughed uncomfortably.  She was conscious, as she went out to speak to Kow about breakfast, and to give a final glance at fires and lights, that this was one of the times when girls needed a wise mother, or a father, who could decide, blame, and advise.

Coming back from the kitchen, with a pitcher of hot water, she saw Martin, in a welter of evening papers, staring at the last pink ashes of the wood fire.  Upon seeing her he got up, and with a cautious glance toward the bedroom doors he said: