He sympathized as little with another friendship she made, some months later, with the wife of a young engineer who had recently come to the mine.  Pauline Runyon was a few years older than her husband, a handsome, thin, intense woman, who did everything in an entirely individual way.  She took one of the new little bungalows that were being erected in Red Creek “Park,” and furnished it richly and inappropriately, and established a tea table and a samovar beside the open fireplace.  Cherry began to like better than anything else in the world the hours she spent with Pauline.  She would have liked to go every day, and every day argued and debated the propriety of doing so, in her heart.

Not since the days of her engagement to Martin, and then only on a few occasions, had she felt the thrill that she experienced now, when Pauline, with her dark eyes and her frilly parasol, wandered in the kitchen door, to sit laughing and talking for a few minutes, or when she herself dressed and crossed the village, and went up past the packing plant and the storage barns to the two small cement gate posts and the length of rusty chain that marked the entrance to Red Creek “Park.”  Then there would be tea, poetry, talk, and the flattery that Pauline quite deliberately applied to Cherry, and the flattery that Cherry all unconsciously lavished on her friend in return.

Pauline read Browning, Francis Thompson, and Pater, and introduced Cherry to new worlds of thought.  She talked to Cherry of New York, which she loved, and of the men and women she had met there.  She sometimes sighed and pushed the bright hair back from Cherry’s young and innocent and discontented little face, and said, tenderly, “On the stage, my dear—­anywhere, everywhere, you would be a furore!”

And thinking, in the quiet evenings—­for Martin’s work kept him later and later at the mine—­Cherry came to see that her marriage had been a great mistake.  She had not been ready for marriage.  She would sit on the back steps, as the evenings grew cooler, and watch the exquisite twilight fade, and the sorrow and beauty of life would wring her heart.

Darkness came, the Turner children shrieked, laughed, clattered dishes, and were silent.  Cherry would sit on, her arms wrapped in her apron, her eyes staring into the young night.  In the darkness she could only see the great shadows that were the Adams’ windmill, and the old Brown barn, and the Cutters’ house down the back road.  The dry earth seemed awake at night, stretching itself, under brown sods, for a great breath of relief in the merciful coolness.  Cherry could smell grapes, and smell the pleasant wetness of the dust where the late watering cart had passed by, after sunset.  The roads were too hot for watering all day long, and this sweet, wet odour only came with the night.