“Can you help us?” The doctor echoed his question doubtfully.  “I don’t know that it can be done!” he admitted.

“This shameless old man has just confessed that he gouged the heart out of the poor tree a week ago,” Alix said, getting to her feet.  “That’s the first use he put his birthday knife to!  And Anne stood here and abetted him, as far as I can find out!”

“How you garble things, Alix!” Anne said, giving her hand to Martin.  “I came out here to find my uncle busily pruning and chopping the dead underwood away, but I had no more to do with it than you had!”

“What’s that you’re eating—­an apricot?” Martin said to Anne, in his laughing way.  “I was going to say that if it was a peach, you are a cannibal!”

“Oh, help!” Alix ejaculated, with a look of elaborate scorn.

“No, but where were you last night?” Martin added in a lower tone when he and Anne could speak unnoticed.  The happy colour flooded her face.

“I have to take care of my family sometimes!” she reminded him demurely.  “Wasn’t Cherry a good substitute?”

“Cherry’s adorable!” he agreed heartily.

“Isn’t she sweet?” Anne asked enthusiastically.  “She’s only a little girl, really, but she’s a little girl who is going to have a lot of attention some day!” she added, in her most matronly manner.

Martin did not answer, but turning briskly toward the doctor, he devoted himself to the business in hand.  Peter had climbed on an inverted barrel, to inspect and advise.  Alix dashed upstairs for nails and hammer; the doctor whittled pegs; Martin measured the comparative strength of ropes and branches with a judicial eye and hand.  Anne flitted about, suggesting, commenting, her pretty little head tipped to one side.

They were all deep in the first united tug, each person placed carefully by the doctor, and guys for the rope driven at intervals decided by Martin, when there was an interruption for Cherry’s arrival on the scene.  With characteristic coquetry she did not approach, as the others had, by means of the front porch and the garden path, but crept from the study window into a veritable tunnel of green bloom, and came crawling down it, as sweet and fragrant, as lovely and as fresh, as the roses themselves.  She wore a scant pink gingham that had been a dozen times to the tub, and was faded and small; it might have been a regal mantle and diadem without any further enhancing her extraordinary beauty.  Her bright head was hidden by a blue sunbonnet, assumed, she explained later, because the thorns tangled her hair; but as, laughing and smothered with roses, she crept into view, the sunbonnet slipped back, and the lovely, flushed little face, with tendrils of gold straying across the white forehead, and mischief gleaming in the blue, blue eyes was framed only in loosened pale gold hair.

Years afterward Alix remembered her so, as Martin Lloyd helped her to spring free of the branches, and she stood laughing at their surprise and still clinging to his hand.  “The day we raised the rose tree” had a place of its own in Alix’s memory, as a time of carefree fun and content, a time of perfume and sunshine—­perhaps the last time of its kind that any one of them was to know.