“What put that into your head?” he asked, presently, smoking with his eyes fixed upon the valley far below.

“Just—­being here,” she answered.  And as he glanced over his shoulder he met her smile.

“You’ve been here a thousand times without ever paying me a compliment!” he reminded her.

Cherry considered this, her brows drawn a trifle together.

“Perhaps,” she offered, presently, “it’s because there are so many changes, Peter; my marriage, Anne’s—­everything different!  It just came to me that it is nice to have this always the same.”

“Perhaps Alix will come up here and help keep it so some day,” the man said, deliberately.  Cherry’s look of elaborate surprise and pleasure died before his serious glance.  She was silent for a moment.

“Why don’t you ask her?” she said in a low, thoughtful tone, trembling, eager to preserve his mood without a false note.

“I have,” he answered simply.  Cherry’s heart jumped with a sudden unexpected emotion.  What was it?  Not pleasure, not all surprise—­ surely there could be no jealousy mixed with her feeling for Peter’s plans?  But she was dazed with the rush of feeling; hurt in some fashion she could not stop to dissect now.  Only this morning she had felt that Peter was not good enough for Alix; now, suddenly, he began to seem admirable and dear and unlike everybody else—­

“And she said no?” she stammered in confusion.

“She said no.  Or, at least, I intimated that I was a lonely old affectionate man with this and that to offer, and she intimated that that wasn’t enough.  It was all—­” he laughed—­“It was all extremely sketchy!”

“Peter, but what does she want?” There was actual sisterly indignation in Cherry’s tone.

“Oh, Alix is quite right!” he answered, lightly.  “I ought to have said—­I ought to explain—­that I had told her, only a few days previously, that I had always loved somebody else!”

“Oh-h-h!” Cherry was enlightened.  She visualized an affair in the last years of the old century for Peter.

“Oh, and—­and she didn’t love you?” Cherry asked.

“The lady?  She was unfortunately married before I had a chance to ask her,” said Peter.

“Oh-h-h!” Cherry said again, impressed, “and you’ll never get over it?” she asked, timidly.  “Peter, I never knew that!” she added as he was silent.  “Does—­does Dad know?”

“Nobody knows but Alix, and she only knows the bare facts,” he assured her.

“Oh!” Cherry could think of nothing to add to the sympathetic little monosyllable.  Twilight was reaching even the hilltop, the canyons were rilling with violet shadows; the sweet, pungent odour of the first dew, falling on warm dust, crept across the garden.

“Finished with the shower!” shrieked Alix from the warm darkness inside the doorway.  “Hurry up, Peter, something smells utterly grand!”

“That’s the chicken thing!” Peter shouted back, springing up to disappear in the direction of the bathroom.  Cherry sat on, silent, wrapped still in the new spell of the pleasant voice, the strangely appealing and yet masterful personality.