Cherry came out of the house with her hat on, and Buck leaped before her into the back seat.  Alix watched her as she stepped up on the running board, and saw the colour flicker in her beautiful face.

“I thought you were going to walk?” Peter said, nervously.  He had sauntered up to them with an air of indifference.

“Shall I?” faltered Cherry.  She looked at Alix, who had not yet climbed into the car and was pulling on her driving gloves.  Alix, toward whose face the dog was making eager springs, did not appear interested, so Cherry turned to Martin.  “Walk with us, Mart?” she said.

“Nix,” Martin said, comfortably, not stirring.

“I’ll be home before you, Pete, and wait for you,” Alix said.  She looked at him irresolutely, as if she would have added more, but evidently decided against it and spoke again only in reference to the dog.  “Keep Buck with you, will you, Pete?” she said.  “He’s getting too lazy.  No, sir!” she reproached the animal affectionately.  “You shall not ride!  Well, the dear old Bucky-boy, does he want to come along?”

And she knelt down and put her arms about the animal, and laid her brown cheek against his head.

“You old fool!” she said, shaking him gently to and fro.  “You’ve got to stay with Peter.  Old Buck—!” Suddenly she was on her feet and had sprung into her place.

“Hold him, Pete!” she said.  “Goodbye, Sis dear!  All right, Martin?”

The engine raced; the car slipped smoothly into gear and vanished.  Peter and Cherry stood looking at each other.

“Give them a good start, or Buck will catch them,” Peter said, his body swaying with the frantic jumping of the straining dog.  But to himself he said, with a sense of shock:  “Alix knows!”

Buck was off like a rocket when he finally set him free; his feathery tail disappeared between the columns of the redwoods.  Without speaking, Cherry and Peter started after him.

“And now that we are alone together,” Cherry said, after a few minutes, “there seems to be nothing to say!  We’ve said it all.”

“Nothing to say!” Peter echoed.  “Alix knows,” he said in his heart.

“Whatever we do, it all seems so—­wrong!” Cherry said with watering eyes.

“Whatever we do is wrong,” he agreed, soberly.

“But we go?” she said on a fluttering breath.

“We must go!” Peter answered.  And again, like the ominous fall of a heavy bell-tongue, the words formed in his heart:  “Alix knows.  Alix knows.”

He thought of the afternoon, only a few weeks ago, when Cherry’s beauty had made so sudden and so irresistible an appeal to him, and of the innocent delight of their luncheons together, when she had first confided in him, and of the days of secret and intense joy that her mere nearness and the knowledge that he would see her had afforded him.  It had all seemed so fresh, so natural, so entirely their own affair, until the tragic day of Martin’s reappearance and the hour of agonized waiting at the boat for the Cherry who did not come.  There had been no joyous self-confidence in that hour, none in the distressed hour at the Orpheum, and the hour just past, when Cherry’s rarely displayed passion had wrenched from him his last vestige of doubt.