Every day she had several vigils in the sick-room, and every day at least one long talk with the doctors.  Peter would find her deep in letters and documents, or find her—­who had loved to be idle, a few weeks ago—­busily sewing.  Sometimes she gave him a long list of things to do for her in the village and the city, and every day she wrote notes—­Cherry, who had always hated to write notes!—­to thank the friends who had sent in flowers, soups, and jellies, and custards for the patient.  Every afternoon and evening had its callers; she and Peter were rarely alone.

Martin was utterly unconscious of the life that flowed on about him; sometimes he seemed to recognize Cherry, and would stare with painful intentness into her face, but after a few seconds his gaze would wander to the strange nurses, and the room that he had never known, and with a puzzled sigh he would close his eyes again, and drift back into his own strange world of pain, fever, and unconsciousness.

Almost every day there was the sudden summons and panic in the old house, Peter going toward the sick-room with a thick beating at his heart, Cherry entering, white-faced and with terrified eyes, doctors and nurses gathering noiselessly near for the last scene in the drama of Martin’s suffering.  But the release did not come.

There would be murmuring among the doctors and nurses; the pulse was gaining, not losing; the apparently fatal, final symptoms were proving neither fatal nor final.  The tension would relax; a doctor would go, a nurse slip from the room; Cherry, looking anxiously from one face to another, would breathe more easily.  It was inevitable, she knew that now—­but it was not to be this minute, it was not to be this hour!

“My dear—­my dear!” Peter said to her, one day, when spent and shaken she came stumbling from Martin’s bedside, and stood dazedly looking from the window into the soaking October forest, like a person stunned from a blow.  “My poor little Cherry!  If I could spare you this!”

“Nobody can spare me now!” she whispered.  And very simply and quietly she added, “If I have been a fool—­if I have been a selfish, wicked girl, all my life, I am punished!” She was clinging to the unpainted wood that framed the window, her hand above her head, and her face resting against her arm.  “I am punished!” she added.

“Cherry!” he protested, heartsick to see her so.

“Was it wrong for us to love each other, Peter?” she asked, in a low tone.  “I suppose it was!  I suppose it was!  But it never seemed as if—­” she shut her eyes and shivered—­“as if—­this—­would come of it!” she whispered.

“This!” he echoed, aghast.

“Oh, I think this is punishment,” Cherry continued, in the same lifeless, weary tone.

There was a silence.  The rain dripped and dripped from the redwoods, the room in which they stood was in twilight, even at noon.  Peter could think of nothing to say.