“I should be sorry,” Cherry’s father admitted.

“Sorry!” Peter echoed impatiently.  “But it’s quite out of the question, of course!  It’s quite out of the question.  You mustn’t—­ we mustn’t—­let ourselves get scared about the first man that looks at her.  She—­she wouldn’t consider him for an instant,” he suddenly decided in great satisfaction.  “You mustn’t forget that she has something to do with it!  Very fastidious, Cherry.  She’s not like other girls!”

“That’s true—­that’s true!” Doctor Strickland agreed, in great relief.  They turned back toward the garden, in time to meet Alix and several dogs streaming across the clearing.  Over the girl’s shoulder was coiled the great rope; she leaped various logs and small bushes as she came, and the dogs barked madly and leaped with her.  Breathless, she stumbled and fell into her father’s arms, and both men had the same thought, one that made them smile upon her tomboyishness indulgently:  “If this is twenty-one—­ eighteen is three long years younger and less responsible!”

CHAPTER II

Immediately they gathered by the fallen rose vine, all talking and disputing at once.  Alix and the dogs added only noise to the confusion; the men debated, measured, and doubted; Anne, busy with household duties, came and went smilingly.  About them stretched the forest, wrapped in the summer morning stillness that is really compounded of a thousand happy sounds.  There was no fog now; warm spokes of sunshine fell brightly into the dim, glowing heart of the woods; bees and birds murmured on short journeys; aromatic sweetness drifted on the air.

They had known a thousand such mornings, the doctor and his girls, still, exquisite, happy, dedicated to some absurd undertaking.  They had built chicken pens, they had dammed or cleared the creek, they had felled bay-trees, and lopped the lower branches of the redwoods, they had built roaring bonfires, or painted the porch floor, and many times they had roasted chops or potatoes at the brick oven, and feasted royally in the open forest.

A light rope was tied; an experimental tug broke it like a string, tumbling Alix violently in a sitting position, and precipitating her father into a loamy bed.  Anne, who was bargaining with a Chinese fruit vendor frankly interested in their undertaking, had called that she would help them in a second, when behind Alix, who was still sitting on the ground, another voice offered help.

A young man had come into the doctor’s garden; work was stopped for a few minutes while they welcomed Martin Lloyd.

He was tall and fair, broad, but with not an ounce of extra weight, with brown eyes always laughing, and a ready friendliness always in evidence.  He was dressed becomingly to-day, in a brown army shirt open at the throat, and shabby golf trousers that met his thick woollen stockings at the knee.  Anne’s heart gave a throb of approval as she studied him; Alix flushed furiously, scowled a certain boyish approval; Cherry had not come down.