“Mr. Bates, I want to make you acquainted with my wife!”

“Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Lloyd!” said the fat man, pleasantly.  Martin told Cherry, when they passed him, that that was the superintendent of the mine, and seemed pleased at the encounter.  And Cherry smiled up at the blue sky, and felt the warmth and silence of the day saturate her whole being.  Presently Martin put his arm about her, and the bay horse dawdled along at his own sweet will, while Martin’s deep voice told his wife over and over again how adorable and beautiful she was, and how he loved her.

Cherry listened happily, and for a little while the old sense of pride and achievement came back—­she was married, she was wearing a plain gold ring!  But after a few days that feeling vanished forever, and instead it began to seem strange to her that she had ever been anything else than Martin’s wife.  The other women at the mine were married; she was married; and nobody seemed to think the thing remarkable in them, or in her.  She was, to be sure, younger and prettier than any of the others, but the men she met here were not the sort whose admiration would have satisfied her innocent ambition to have Martin’s friends flock about her adoringly, and more than that, they knew her to be newly married, and left the young Lloyds to their presumably desired isolation.  And very soon Cherry found herself a little housewife among other housewives, much more praised if she made a good shortcake than because the tilt of her new hat was becoming.

For several days she and Martin laughed incessantly, and praised each other incessantly, while they experimented with cooking, and ate delicious gipsy meals.  In these days Martin was always late at the mine, and every evening he came home to find that ducks, or a jar of honey, or a loaf of cake, had been contributed to Cherry’s dinner by the interested women in the near-by cottages.  In all, there were not a dozen families at the “Emmy Younger,” and Cherry was watched with interest and sympathy during her first efforts at housekeeping.

By midwinter she had settled down to the business of life, buying bacon and lard and sugar and matches at the store of the mine, cooking and cleaning, sweeping and making beds.  She still kissed Martin good-bye every morning, and met him with an affectionate rush at the door when he came home, and they played Five Hundred evening after evening after dinner, quarrelling for points, and laughing at each other, while rain sluiced down on the “Emmy Younger,” and dripped on the porch.  But sometimes she wondered how it had all come about, wondered what had become of the violent emotions that had picked her out of the valley home, and established her here, in this strange place, with this man she had never seen a year ago.