“Only two!” she echoed, nervously.  “I promised him to-night that I would write to his mother about our coming—­”

“You talk as if you meant to go with Martin!” he said, smiling.

“I know I do, sometimes, and that’s one of the things that worries me!” she answered, quickly.  “So many things have happened, and I get so confused, thinking,” she went on, “that I am all mixed most of the time!  I arrange one thing as if I were going to do what Martin thinks I am—­go with him to Portland, I mean—­at another time I’ll get into long talks with Alix of what divorces would mean, and all the time I am straining toward you—­and escape from it all!  It worries and frightens and puzzles me so,” she confided, raising her lovely eyes to him, “that I am almost afraid to speak at all for fear of betraying myself!”

“Don’t speak at all then!” he answered, smiling whimsically.

“Shall I just let him think I am quietly going away with him on Monday?” she asked, after a silence in which she was deeply thinking.

“Does he know you had that letter?” Peter said.

“No; Alix is going to speak to him about it.”  Cherry outlined the talk that she and her sister had had at breakfast.

“Then I shouldn’t bring up the question at all,” Peter decided, quickly.  “It would only mean an ugly and unnecessary scene.  If you were going to be here, it would be very different.  Even then you might have to face a terrible publicity and unpleasantness.  But as it is, it’s much wiser to let him continue to think that you don’t know anything about it, and to let Alix think that you are ignoring the whole thing!”

“Until Sunday!” she whispered.

“Until Sunday.”  Peter glanced at Martin and Alix, who were talking together absorbedly, in low tones.  “My little sweetheart, I’ll make all this misery up to you!” he whispered.  Her little hand was locked in his for the rest of the evening.

The vaudeville performance ended, and they went out into the cool night, decided against a supper, found the car where Alix had parked it in a quiet side street, and made their way to the ferry, and so home under the dark low arch of a starless and moonless sky.  Cherry shared the driver’s seat with her sister to-night; they spoke occasionally on the long drive; everybody was weary and silent.  Alix, racing between Sausalito’s low hills and the dark, odorous marshes, wondered if in the packed theatre any other four hearts had borne the burden that these four were bearing.

The car flew on its way; the men, in the back seat, occasionally exchanged brief, indifferent remarks.  Cherry, staring straight ahead of her, neither moved nor spoke, and Alix, at the wheel, watching the road and the lights keenly, and listening to the complicated breathing of the machinery, resumed again the endless chain of thought.  Peter—­Cherry—­Martin—­Dad—­the few people with whom her life concerned wheeled in unceasing confusion through her brain, and always it was herself, Alix, who would have died for them, who must somehow find the solution.