“But you do look fagged and pale, little girl,” he told her.  “You’re to stay in bed in the morning.”

“Oh, I’ll be down!” she assured him.  But she did not come down in the morning, none the less.  She was tired in soul and body, and glad to let them spoil her again, glad to rest and sleep in the heavenly peace and quiet of the old home.

Midsummer heat was upon the little valley, but here under the redwoods there was always coolness; delicious odours of warm sap and loamy sweetness drifted into Cherry’s darkened room; the morning was fresh and foggy, and the night before she had smiled drowsily to stir from first sleep and find her father bending over her, drawing up an extra blanket in the old way.  All night long she slept deeply and sweetly, as she had slept through all the nights of childhood; it was ten o’clock when Alix came smiling in with a breakfast tray.  Presently she carried it away, and Cherry, with a deep sigh from the fullness of her content, turned on her side and drowsed again.

Waking, after a while, she locked her hands under her head, and lay listening happily to the old and familiar sounds of home.  She heard Hong bargaining in his own minor chatter with a fruit vendor, and Alix and her father chuckling over some small confidence in the porch.  She heard the subdued clink of dishes, the squawk of a surprised chicken, and the girls’ murmuring voices.

It was Saturday, Cherry remembered, when Peter’s voice suddenly sounded above the others and was hastily hushed for her sake; Peter was always there at three o’clock on Saturdays.  There was another voice, too, pleasant and crisp and even a trifle fastidious; that must be Justin.

Late in the afternoon, rested, fresh, and her old sweet self in the white ruffles, she came down to join them.  They had settled themselves under the redwoods, Anne and Justin, Peter and Alix and Buck, the dog, all jumped up to greet her.  Cherry very quietly subsided into a wicker chair, listened rather than talked, moved her lovely eyes affectionately from one to another.

Peter hardly moved his eyes from her, although he did not often address her directly; Justin was quite obviously overcome by the unexpected beauty of Anne’s cousin; Anne herself, with an undefined pang, admitted in her soul that Cherry was prettier than ever; and even Alix was affected.  With the lovely background of the forest, the shade of her thin wide hat lightly shadowing her face, with the dew of her long sleep and recent bath enhancing the childish purity of her skin, and with her blue eyes full of content, Cherry was a picture of exquisite youth and grace and charm.  It was not the less winning because she seemed genuinely unconscious of it to-day; perhaps before the girls and Anne’s precise little fledgling lawyer no self-conscious thought of conquest had entered her head.

The dog had gone to her knee and laid his bronze mane against the white ruffles, and while she listened and smiled, she idly fondled and petted him with her childish, ringed hand.