Tears stood in his eyes, and she forgave him his admiration for Dorothy King, and said that she knew he was good.  And Martin said that he was going to make her the happiest wife a man ever had.

Dragging the stripped tree, they ran down the sharp hill to the house just as Anne came out to announce luncheon.  Peter was wandering off in the woods nearby, but came at Alix’s shrill yell of summons, and looked relieved when he saw Cherry and Martin not even talking to each other.  They had been gone only ten minutes.

Anne, who did not like Peter, had decided not to ask him to stay, but Peter had calmly taken his usual place, and had annoyed Anne with his familiar questioning of Hong as to the amount of butter needed in batter bread.  It was a happy meal for everyone, and after it they had attacked the rose bush again, with aching muscles now, and in the first real summer heat.  It was three o’clock before, with a great crackling, and the scream of a twisted branch, and a general panting and heaving on the part of the workers, at last the feathery mass had risen a foot—­two feet--into the air, had stood tottering like a wall of bloom, and finally, with a downward rush, had settled to its old place on the roof.  Hong was pressed into service now, and with Martin, was on the roof, grappling with a rope, shouting directions.  A shower of tiny blossoms and torn leaves covered the steps of the office-porch, the garden beds were trampled deep, the seven labourers breathless and exhausted.  But the rose vine was in place!  Alix shouted congratulations to Martin as he busily roped and tied the recaptured masses in their old position.  Anne had vanished for sandwiches; Peter was being scientifically bandaged by the doctor.  Cherry stood looking up at the roof; she did little talking; she watched Martin during every second he spent there.

Her small heart was bursting with excitement.  He had found easy opportunities to talk to her a dozen times under cover of the general noise.  He had said wonderful and thrilling things.

“How is my own girl?  Sweetheart, you’re the sweetest rose of them all!  Cherry, do you suppose they can see from our faces how happy we are?” Little sentences that meant nothing when other lips spoke them, but that his voice made immortal.

Looking up at him, she thought of the glorious days ahead.  How they would all wonder and exclaim; yes, and how the girls would envy her!  Little Cherry, just eighteen, going to be married, and married to a man that Alix or Anne would have been only too glad to win!  A real man, from the outside world, a man of twenty-eight, ten years older than she was.  And how the letters and presents and gowns and plans would begin to flutter through the bungalow—­she would be married in cafe-au-lait rajah cloth, as Miss Pinckney in San Francisco was; she would be Mrs. Lloyd!  She could chaperone Alix and Anne—­

There was a rending, slipping noise on the roof, a scream from Martin, and shouts from the doctor and Peter.  With a great sliding and rushing of the refractory sprays, and with a horrifying stumbling and falling, down came Martin, caught in a great rope of the creeper, almost at her feet.