When Martin asked her if she liked to be a married woman, travelling with her husband, she smiled and said that it seemed “funny.”  For the most part she was silent, pleased and interested, but not quite her usual unconcerned self.  She and Alix, taking this trip, would have been chattering like magpies.  She and Martin had their dinner in the train, and then she did brighten, trying to pierce with her eyes the darkness outside, and getting only a lovely reflected face under bronzed cocks feathers, instead.  After dinner they had a long, murmured talk; she began to droop sleepily now, although even this long day had not paled her cheeks or visibly tired her.

At ten they stumbled out, cramped and over-heated, and smitten on tired foreheads with a rush of icy mountain air.

“Is this the pl-l-ace?” yawned Cherry, clinging to his arm.

“This is the place, Baby Girl, El Nido, and not much of a place!” her husband told her.  “That’s the Hotel McKinley, over there where the lights are!  We stay there to-night, and drive out to the mine to-morrow.  I’ll manage the bags, but don’t you stumble!”

She was wide-awake now, looking alertly about her at the dark streets of the little town.  Mud squelched beneath their feet, planks tilted.  Beside Martin Cherry entered the bright, cheerful lobby of a cheap hotel where men were smoking and spitting.  She was beside him at the desk, and saw him write on the register, “J.  M. Lloyd and wife.”  The clerk pushed a key across the counter; Martin guided her to a rattling elevator.

She had a fleeting thought of home; of Dad reading before the fire, of the little brown room upstairs, with Alix, slender in her thin nightgown, yawning over her prayers.  A rush of reluctance—­of strangeness—­of something like terror smote her.  She fought the homesickness down resolutely; everything would seem brighter to-morrow, when the morning and the sunshine came again.

There was a brown and red carpet in the oblong of the room, and a brown bureau, and a wide iron bed with a limp spread, and a peeling brown washstand with a pitcher and basin.  The boy lighted a flare of electric lights which made the chocolate and gold wallpaper look like one pattern in the light and another in the shadow.  A man laughed in the adjoining room; the voice seemed very near.

Cherry had never been in a hotel of this sort before; she learned later that El Nido was extremely proud of it, with its rattling elevator and its dining room on the “American Plan.”  It seemed to her cheap and horrible; she did not want to stay in this room, and Martin, tipping the boy and asking for ice-water, seemed somehow a part of this new strangeness and crudeness.  She began to be afraid that he would think she was silly, presently, if she said her prayers as usual.

In the morning Martin hired a phaeton, and they drove out to the mine.  It had rained in the night, and there were pools of water on the soft dirt road, but the sky was high and blue, and the air tingled with sweetness and freshness after the shower.  Cherry had had a good breakfast, and was wearing a new gown; they stopped another phaeton on the long, pleasant drive and Martin said to the fat man in it: