“No, no, my darling—­you mustn’t say that!” he said, in distress.  “I like him very much—­I think he’s a thoroughly fine fellow!  I could wish—­just with an old father’s selfishness—­that he was a neighbour, that he didn’t plan to take you away entirely.  That’s natural, before I give him the thing I hold most precious in the world.  And that’s just it, Cherry.  Wait a year or two, and perhaps it will be possible to establish him here near us.  You’ll have a little money, dear, and Martin says himself that he would much prefer office work to this constant changing.  Marriage is a great change, anyway.  Everything is different; your point of view, your very personality changes with it.  You’ll be lonely, my dear.  You’ll miss your sister and Anne, and all the old friends.  There are cases where it must be so, of course.  But in your case—­”

He stopped, discouraged.  She was sitting opposite him at the shabby writing table, her elbows resting upon it, her full lips pouting with disappointment.  Perhaps the one phrase of her new plans that pleased Cherry most was that she was to be carried entirely away from the familiar atmosphere in which she would always be “little Cherry,” and subject to suggestions and criticisms.  Now she began slowly to shake her head.

“Can’t take your old father’s word for it?” Doctor Strickland asked.

“It isn’t that, Dad!” she protested eagerly and affectionately.  “I’ll wait—­I have waited!  I’ll wait until Christmas, or April, if you say so!  But it won’t make any difference, nothing will.  I love him and he loves me, and we always will.

“You don’t know,” Cherry went on, with suddenly watering eyes, “you don’t know what this summer of separation has meant to us both!  If we must wait longer, why, we will of course, but it will mean that I’ll never have a happy instant!  It will mean that I am just living along somehow—­oh, I won’t cry!” she interrupted, smiling with wet lashes, “I’ll try to bear it decently!  But sometimes I feel as if I couldn’t bear it—­”

A rush of tears choked her.  She groped for a handkerchief, and felt, as she had felt so many times, her father’s handkerchief pressed into her hand.  The doctor sighed.  There was nothing more to be said.

So he gave Cherry a wedding check that made her dance with joy, and there was no more seriousness.  There were gowns, dinners, theatre-parties, and presents; every day brought its new surprise and new delight to Cherry.  She had her cream-coloured rajah silk, but her sister and cousin persuaded her to be married in white, and it was their hands that dressed the first bride when the great day came, and fastened over her corn-coloured hair her mother’s lace veil.

It was a day of soft sweetness, not too brightly summery, but warm and still under the trees.  Until ten o’clock the mountain and the tops of the redwoods were tangled in scarfs of white fog, then the mellow sunlight pierced it with sudden spectacular brightening and lifting.