June passed; July passed; it was hot at the “Emmy Younger.”  August came in on a furnace breath; Cherry felt headachy, languid, and half sick all the time.  She hated housekeeping in this weather; hated the smells of dry tin sink and wooden floor, of milk bottles and lard tins.  Martin had said that he could not possibly get away, even for the week of Anne’s wedding, but Cherry began to wonder if he would let her go alone.

“If he doesn’t, I shall be sick!” she fretted to herself, in a certain burning noontime, toward the middle of August.  Blazing heat had been pouring over the mine since six o’clock; there seemed to have been no night.  Martin, who had been playing poker the night before, was sleeping late this morning.  He was proud of the little wife who so generously spared him for an occasional game, and always allowed him to sleep far into the following morning.  Other wives at the mine were not so amiable where poker was concerned.  But Martin, coming home at three o’clock, dazed with close air and cigar smoke, had awakened his wife to tell her that he would be “dead” in the morning, and Cherry had accordingly crept about her own dressing noiselessly, had darkened the bedroom, and eaten her own breakfast without the clatter of a dish, putting the coffee aside to be reheated for him when he awakened.  Now she was sitting by the window, panting in the noon heat, and looking down upon a dazzle of dust and ugliness and smothering hotness.  She was thinking, as it chanced, of the big forest at home, and of a certain day—­just one of their happy days!—­only a year ago, when she had lain for a dreamy hour on the soft forest floor, staring up idly through the laced fanlike branches, and she thought of her father, with his mild voice and ready smile; and some emotion, almost like fear, came over her.  For the first time she asked herself, in honest bewilderment, why she had married.

The heat deepened and strengthened and increased as the burning day wore on.  Martin waked up, hot and headachy, and having further distressed himself with strong coffee and eggs, departed into the dusty, motionless furnace of out-of-doors.  The far brown hills shimmered and swam, the “Emmy Younger” looked its barest, its ugliest, its least attractive self.  Cherry moved slowly about the kitchen; her head ached; it was a day of sickening odours.  The ice man had failed them again, the soup had soured, and after she had thrown it away Cherry felt as if the grease and the smell of it still clung to her fingers.

There was a shadow in the doorway; she looked up surprised.  For a minute the tall figure in striped linen and the smiling face under the flowery hat seemed those of a stranger.  Then Cherry cried out, and laughed, and in another instant was crying in Alix’s arms.

Alix cried, too, but it was with a great rush of pity and tenderness for Cherry.  Alix had not young love and novelty to soften the outlines of the “Emmy Younger,” and she felt, as she frankly wrote later, to her father, “at last convinced that there is a hell!” The heat and bareness and ugliness of the mine might have been overlooked, but this poor little house of Cherry’s, this wood stove draining white ashes, this tin sink with its pump, and the bathroom with neither faucets nor drain, almost bewildered Alix with their discomfort.