But this was the culminating unhappiness, that he should know, from Alix’s brave and gentle and generous look as they parted, that Alix knew.  He had, in the wild rush and hurry of his thoughts, no time now to analyze what their love must mean to her, but it hurt him to see on her happy face those lines of sternness and gravity, to see her bright and honest eyes shadowed with that new look of pain.

It was too late now to undo it; he and Cherry must carry their desperate plan to a conclusion now, must disappear—­and forget.  They had tried, all this last dreadful week, they had both tried, to extinguish the flames, and they had failed.  But to Peter there was no comforting thought anywhere.  Wrong would be done to Martin, to Alix, to Cherry—­and more than even these, wrong to himself, to the ideal of himself that had been his for so many years, to the real Peter Joyce.

“If I had it all to do over again, I should not come here,” Cherry began, breathlessly.

“Ah, if we had it all to do over again!” Looking back half a dozen years, how simple it all seemed!  How uncomplicated life was, in those old days when the doctor and his girls had teased him, and consulted him, and made him one of themselves.  “What a web, Cherry!” he said, sadly.  “If Anne hadn’t made her claim, you would not have been kept here all these weeks; if the financial question hadn’t been raised, you must have stayed in Red Creek, simply because you couldn’t well have done anything else.”

“And if I had been with Martin, this horrible business of that girl’s letter wouldn’t have happened,” she added, bravely.  “Oh, yes—­that’s quite true!” she interrupted him, as he interpolated a bitter protest.  “Mart has no particular principle about it, but he never would have got in with that crowd if I had been there.  So that once more,” she ended, sadly, “I can say that I have made a mess of things.  Listen, that’s Buck!” she interrupted herself, as the dog’s loud and violent barking reached them from beyond a turn in the twisting road.  “He didn’t catch them, then.”

The next instant a woman came up the road, running, and making a queer, whimpering noise that Cherry never forgot.  She was a stranger to them, but she ran toward them, making the odd, gasping noise with much dry mouthing, and with wild eyes.

Horror was in her aspect, and horror was the emotion that the first glimpse of her awakened vaguely in their hearts, but as she saw them she suddenly found voice for so hideous a scream that Cherry’s knees failed her, and Peter sprang forward with a shout.

He gripped the woman’s arm, and her frantic eyes were turned to him.

“Oh, my God!” she cried in a hoarse, cawing voice.  “My God!  They’re over the bank—­they’re over the bank!”

“Who?” Peter shouted, his heart turning to ashes.

“Oh, the car—­the automobile!” the woman mouthed.  “Oh, my God—­I saw it go!  I saw it fall!  Oh, God, save them-oh, God, take them, don’t let them suffer that way!”