He sighed, smiled, and got to his feet.  “That’s not in our hands,” he said, cheerfully.

Alix, without moving, sent her glance from his face to Peter’s, and their eyes met.  Only a few words, spoken half in earnest, on a spring morning tramp, and yet they had their place, in her memory and Peter’s, and were to return to them after a time, and influence them more seriously than either the man, or the grinning girl, or the old man himself ever dreamed.

The glance lasted only a second, then Alix, who had been carefully removing burrs from the soft tangle of the dog’s tasselled ears, took the trail again with great, boyish springs of her bloomered legs.

“Father,” said she, “am I to understand that you disapprove of my choice?”

“I hope,” her father answered, seriously, “that when you do marry you will get a man half as good as Peter!”

“Thank you!” Peter said, gravely, more as a rebuke to the incorrigible Alix than because he was giving the conversation much attention.

Alix had time for no comment, for at this moment she placed her foot upon an unsubstantial root and slid down upon the two men with such an unpremeditated rush of heavy boots, wet loam, loosened rocks, and cascading earth, that the footing of them all was threatened, and it was only after much shouting, staggering, balancing, and clutching that they resumed their climb.  Peter was then nursing a wrist that had been wrenched in the confusion, looking away from it only to give the loudly singing Alix an occasional resentful glance.

“You could omit some of those cries!” he presently observed.

“I thought you liked ’The Lotos Flower’?” Alix called back.

“I just proved that I do,” Peter said neatly, and the doctor, and Alix herself, laughed joyously.

In June came the blissful hour in which Anne, all blushes and smiles, could come to her uncle with a dutiful message from the respectfully adoring Justin.  Their friendship, said Anne, had ripened into something deeper.

“Justin wants to have a frank talk with you, Uncle,” Anne said, “and of course I’m not to go until you are sure you can spare me, and unless you feel that you can trust him utterly!”

“And remember that you aren’t losing a daughter, but gaining a son—­Oh, help!” Alix added.  Anne gave her a reproachful glance, but found it impossible to be angry with her.  She was too genuinely delighted with her cousin’s happiness and too helpful with all the new plans.  Anne’s engagement cups were ranged on the table where Cherry’s had stood, and where Cherry had talked of a coffee-coloured rajah silk Anne discussed the merits of a “smart but handsome blue tailormade.”

The wedding was to be in September, not quite a year after Cherry’s wedding.  Alix wrote her sister pages about it, always ending with the emphatic declaration that Cherry must come down for the wedding.

Cherry read of it with a strange pang.  Somehow it robbed her own marriage of flavour and charm to have Anne so quickly following in her footsteps.  She was homesick.  She dreamed continually of the cool, high valley, the scented aisles of the deep forest, the mountain rearing its rough summit to the pale blue of summer skies.