“He can’t live,” she said in a whisper.

“Perhaps not,” Peter answered very low.  Cherry returned to her sombre musing.

“We didn’t see this end to it, did we?” she said with a pitiful smile after a long while.

“Oh, no—­no!” Peter said, shutting his eyes, and with a faint, negative movement of his head.

“We wouldn’t have had this happen—­” Cherry began.  Her lips trembled, her whole face wrinkled, and she put her hand across her eyes and pressed it there with a gesture of forlornness and sorrow that wrenched Peter’s heart.  Her tears began to fall fast.

“Poor Cherry—­if I could spare you all this!” he said, knotting his fingers and feeling for the first time the prick of bitter tears against his eyelids.

“Oh, there is nothing you can do,” she said faintly and wearily after a while.  And she whispered, as if to herself, “Nothing—­ nothing—­nothing!”

Then there was silence again.  The lamps burned softly; the fire sucked and flickered; a chilling air, full of autumn sadness, began to creep from the corners of the room.  Peter’s eyes moved over the backs of the old books, Dickens and Thackeray and the “Household Book of Verse,” moved to the faded photograph of Cherry’s mother on the mantel, a beautiful woman in the big sleeves of the late nineties.

The doctors came back; there was a little stir and rearrangement as they seated themselves.

“Any change?” Cherry asked, cautiously.

“No change.”  Both men shook their heads.

“Any—­any hope?” she faltered.

The physicians exchanged glances.  No word was spoken, but the look in their faces, the faint narrowing of eyes and compressing of lips, gave her her answer.

CHAPTER XXIII

It was all strange and bewildering, thought Peter.  It was not like anything he had ever connected in his thoughts with Alix, yet it was all for her.

The day was warm and still, and the little church was packed with flowers, and packed with people.  Women were crying, and men were crying, too, rather to his dazed surprise.  The organ was straining through the warm, fragrant air, and the old clergyman, whose venerable, leonine head, in its crown of snowy hair, Peter could see clearly, spoke in a voice that was thickened with tears.  Strangers, or almost strangers, had been touching Peter’s hand respectfully, timidly, had been praising Alix.  She had been “good” to this one, “good” to that one, they told him; she had always been so “interested,” and so “happy.”

Her coffin was buried in flowers, many of them the plain flowers she loved, the gillies and stock and verbena, and even the sweet, sober wall-flowers that were somehow like herself.  But it was the roses that scented the whole world for Alix to-day, and fresh creamy buds had been placed between the waxen fingers.  And still that radiant look of triumphant love lingered on her quiet face, and still the faint ghost of a smile touched the once kindly and merry mouth.