Utterly relaxed, her small figure in its plain black gown, with the childish white she always wore at collar and wrist, looked like the figure of a child.  Her golden hair shone with a dull gleam in the dim light; there was a glint of firelight in her dropped lashes.

“Perhaps it’s the nervous strain,” Peter suggested.  “Of course, you would feel that.”  There was a silence in which neither moved.  Cherry did not even raise her eyelids, and Peter, standing with one arm on the mantel, looked down at her steadily.  “Cherry,” he said, suddenly, “are you and I going to talk to each other like that?”

A flood of colour rose in Cherry’s pale face, and she gave him one appealing glance.

“I don’t—­I don’t think I know what you mean, Peter!”

“Oh, yes; you do!” he said.  He knelt down beside her chair, and gathered her cold hands into one of his own.  “What are you and I going to do?” he asked.

She looked at him in terror.

“But all that is changed!” she said, quickly, fearfully.

“Why is it changed?” he countered.  “I love you—­I have always loved you, since the days long ago, in this very house!  I can’t stop it now.  And you love me, Cherry!”

“Yes, I shall always love you,” she answered, agitatedly, after a pause in which she looked at him with troubled eyes.  “I shall always love you, and always dream of the time when we—­we thought we might belong to each other, Peter.  But—­but—­you must see that we cannot—­cannot think of all that now,” she added with difficulty.  “I couldn’t fail Martin now, when he needs me so!”

“He needs you now,” Peter conceded, “and I don’t ask you to do anything that must distress him now.  But in a few months, when his mother comes down for a visit, what then?”

Cherry’s exquisite eyes were fixed on his.

“Well, what then?” she whispered.

“Then you must tell them honestly that you care for me,” he said.

Cherry was trembling violently.

“But how could I!” she protested.  “Tell him that I am going away, deserting him when he most needs me!”

Peter had grown very pale.

“But—­” he stammered, his face close to hers—­“but you cannot mean that this is the end?”

She moved her lips as if she was about to speak; looked at him blankly.  Then suddenly tears came, and she wrenched her hands free from his, and laid her arms about his neck.  Her wet cheek was pressed to his own, and he put his arms tightly about the little shaken figure.

“Peter!” she whispered, desolately.  And after a time, when the violence of her sobs was lessened, and she was breathing more quietly, she said again:  “Peter!”

He took out his handkerchief, and dried her eyes, and she remained, resting against him like a spent bird, her blue eyes fixed mournfully on the fire, her hands, which had slipped to his breast, gathered in his own, and her bright head on his shoulder.