“Oh, I’ll get along fine!” he answered, indifferently.  Cherry, with a great sigh of relief and delight, abandoned the whole problem; milk bottles, fire wood, groceries, dust, and laundry slipped from her mind as if they had never been.  On the last day of August, in the cream-coloured silk and the expensive hat again, yet looking, Alix thought, strangely unlike the bride that had been Cherry, she and her sister happily departed for cooler regions.  Martin took them to the train, kissed his sister-in-law gaily, and then his wife affectionately,

“Be a good little girl, Babe,” he said, “and write me!”

“Oh, I will—­I will!” Cherry looked after him smilingly from the car window.  “He really is an old dear!” she told Alix.

CHAPTER VI

But when at the end of the long day they reached the valley, and when her father came innocently into the garden and stood staring vaguely at her for a moment—­for her visit, and the day of Alix’s return had been kept a secret—­her first act was to burst into tears.  She clung to the fatherly shoulder as if she were a storm-beaten bird safely home again, and although she immediately laughed at herself, and told the sympathetically watching Peter and Alix that she didn’t know what was the matter with her, it was only to interrupt the words with fresh tears.

Tears of joy, she told them, laughing at the moisture in her father’s eyes.  Hanging on his arm, she went back into the old sitting room again, under the banksia rose; went up the brown stairway to the old, clean, woody-smelling bedroom.  Her hat and wraps went into the closet; she danced and exclaimed and exulted over every familiar detail.

She and Alix ran downstairs before supper, and into the garden, and Cherry drew deep, refreshing breaths of the cool air and laughed over every bush and flower.  Peter came out to join them, her father came down, and she kissed him again; she could not be close enough to him.  She had a special joyous word for Hong; she laughed and teased and questioned Anne, when Anne and Justin came back from an afternoon concert in the city, with an interest and enthusiasm most gratifying to both.

After dinner she had her old place on the arm of her father’s porch chair; Alix, with Buck’s smooth head in her lap, sat on the porch step beside Peter, and the lovers murmured from the darkness of the hammock under the shadow of the rose vine.  It was happy talk in the sweet evening coolness; everybody seemed harmonious and in sympathy to-night.  Alix asked Peter’s advice regarding her White Minorcas and respectfully promised to act upon it, and Cherry showed him a new side, an affectionate, little sisterly deference and confidence quite different from her old childish sulkiness and pretty caprice.

“Bedtime!” said her father presently, and she laughed in sheer pleasure.

“Daddy—­that sounds so nice again!”