“Listen,” began Alix again.  “Let’s stop for Dad, it’s going to pour.  And let’s go up to your house to eat?”

Silence.

“We can play duets all evening!” Alix added, temptingly.

“Little and Anne coming back?” Peter asked, unwillingly.

“No; they’re dining with the Quelquechoses—­those bright-faced, freckled cousins of his,” Alix answered.

“I don’t know that I’ve got anything up there to eat!” Peter said, gloomily.

“Ooo—­say!” Alix said, brightening suddenly with her incorrigible childishness of expression.  “Kow’s got eggs and cream, hasn’t he?  I’ll make that new thing I was telling you about—­it’s delicious.  Oh, and an onion—­” she broke off in concern.

“He has an onion,” Peter admitted.  “What dish?” he asked, interested in spite of himself, as Alix fell into a rapturous reverie.

“Well, you fry a chopped onion,” Alix began, “and then you have a lot of hard-boiled eggs—­” In another moment they were deep in culinary details.

CHAPTER VIII

Martin’s work was in the Contra Costa Valley, and he and Cherry had a small house in Red Creek, the only town of any size near the mine.  Red Creek was in a fruit-farming and dairy region and looked its prettiest on the spring evening when Cherry saw it first.  The locusts were in leaf and ready to bloom, and the first fruit blossoms were scattered in snowy whiteness up and down the valley.

Her little house was a cottage with a porch running across the front where windows looked out from the sitting room and the front bedroom.  Back of these rooms were a dark little bathroom that connected the front bedroom with another smaller bedroom, a little dining room and a kitchen.  Almost all the houses in Red Creek were duplicates, except in minor particulars, of this house, but this particular specimen was older than some of the others and showed signs of hard usage.  The kitchen floor was chipped and stained, and the bathroom basin was plugged with putty; there were odd bottles partly full of shoe polish and ink and vinegar, here and there; and on the shelves of the triangular closet in the dining room were cut and folded pieces of spotted white paper.

Martin, man-fashion, had merely camped in kitchen and bedroom while awaiting his wife; but Cherry buttoned on her crisp little apron on the first morning after her arrival, and attacked the accumulated dishes in the sink, and the scattered shirts and collars bravely.  It was a cold, raw morning, and she went to and fro briskly, burning rubbish in the airtight stove in the sitting room, and keeping a good wood fire going in the kitchen, and feeling housewifely and efficient as she did so.