Her eighteenth birthday!  He learned that she had just put up her hair, indeed, after dinner, her father made her tumble it down in a golden mop again.  “Can’t lose my last girl, you know,” he said to Mrs. North, Martin’s aunt, seriously.  Martin had been shown her birthday gifts:  books and a silver belt buckle and a gold pen and stationery and handkerchiefs.  A day or two later she had had another gift; had opened the tiny Shreve box with a sudden hammering at her heart, with a presage of delight.  She had found a silver-topped candy jar, and the card of Mr. John Martin Lloyd, and under the name, in tiny letters, the words “O fudge!” The girls laughed over this nonsense appreciatively, but there was more than laughter in Cherry’s heart.

From that moment the world was changed.  Her father, her sister, her cousin had second place, now.  Cherry had put out her innocent little hand, and had opened the gate, and had passed through it into the world.  That hour was the beginning, and it had led her surely, steadily, to the other hour to-night when she had been kissed, and had kissed in return.

Nobody dreamed it, she told herself with innocent exultation, looking at Alix, sunk into her chair ungracefully, and at Anne, peacefully sewing.  They thought of her as a child—­she, who was engaged to be married!

“So—­we walk home with young men?” mused the doctor, smiling.  “Look here, girls, this little Miss Muffet will be cutting you both out with that young man, if you’re not careful!”

Alix, deep in her story, did not hear him, but Anne smiled faintly, and faintly frowned as she shook her head.  She considered Cherry sufficiently precocious without Uncle Lee’s ill-considered tolerance.  Anne had often told him that Cherry was the “pink-and-white type” that would attract “boys” soon enough without any encouragement from him.  But he persisted in regarding her as nothing more than a captivating baby!

He would have had them always children, this tender, simple, innocent Doctor Strickland.  He was in many ways a child himself.  He had never made money in his profession; he and his wife and the two tiny girls had had a hard enough struggle sometimes.  Anne and her own father had joined the family eight years ago, in the same year that the Strickland Patent Fire Extinguisher, over which the doctor had been puttering for years, had been sold.  It did not sell, as his neighbours believed, for a million dollars, but for perhaps one tenth of that sum.  It was enough, and more than enough, whatever it was.  After Anne’s father died it meant that the doctor could live on in the brown house under the redwoods, with his girls, reading, fussing with a new invention, walking, consulting with Anne, laughing at Alix, and spoiling his youngest-born.