“Do you remember the day we put the rose tree back, Peter?” she asked.  “When Martin was almost a stranger?  And do you remember the day Cherry and I fell into the Three Wells and you and Dad had to disappear while we dried our clothing on branches of trees?  And do you remember the day we made biscuits, over by the ocean?”

“I remember all the days,” he answered, deeply stirred.

“We didn’t see all this, then,” Alix mused, still playing softly.  “Anne claiming everything for her husband, you and I here talking of Dad’s death, and Cherry married—­” She sighed.

“She’s not happy?” he questioned quickly.

Alix shrugged, pursing her lips doubtfully.

“She’s not unhappy,” she told him, with a troubled smile.  “It’s just one of those marriages that don’t ever get anywhere, and don’t ever stop,” she added.  “Martin has faults, he’s unreasonable, and he makes enemies.  But those aren’t the faults for which a woman can leave her husband.  Oh, Peter,” she added, laying a smooth warm hand on his, and looking straight into his eyes with her honest eyes, “don’t go away again!  Stay here in the valley for a week or two, and help me get everything worked out and thought out—­I’ve been so much alone!”

“Dear old Alix!” he said, sitting down on the bench beside her and putting his arm about her.  She dropped her head on his shoulder, and so they sat, very still, for a long minute.  Alix’s hand went to her own shoulder, and her fingers tightened on his, and she breathed deep, contented breaths, like a child.

“Somebody ought to wire Mrs. Grundy, collect,” she said, after awhile.

“We will defy Mrs. Grundy, my dear,” Peter said, kissing the top of a soft brown braid, “by trotting off hand in hand tomorrow and getting ourselves married.  Why, Alix, he gave us his consent years ago—­don’t you remember?”

“He did wish it!” she said, and burst into tears.

“I seem to be doing things in a slightly irregular manner,” she said to him the next day, when they had gotten breakfast together, and were basking in the sunlight of the upper deck of the ferryboat, on their way to the city.  “I spend the night before my marriage alone—­alone in a small country house hidden in the woods—­with my betrothed, and propose to buy my trousseau immediately after the ceremony!”

“I feel like saying to you what the dear old French archbishop said to the small child,” Peter smiled, marvelling a little nonetheless at her untouched serenity.  “He was speaking to all the children in some institution, and came to this little one:  ’Et tu ETES NEGRE?  Ah, Bien—­Bien, CONTINUEZ—­CONTINUEZ!’ It’s what makes you yourself, Alix, doing everything just a little differently.”

“Marrying you, far from seeming a radical or momentous thing to do,” she assured him, “seems to me like getting back into key—­ getting out of this bad dream of loneliness and change—­securing something that I thought was lost!”