Her voice fell to a dreamy note, and she watched the gulls, wheeling in the sunshine, with thoughtful, smiling eyes.  The man glanced at her once or twice, in the silence that followed, with something like hesitation, or compunction, in his look.

“Look here, Alix—­let’s talk.  I want to ask you something.  Or, rather, I want to tell you something—­or, rather—­”

“CONTINUEZ—­CONTINUEZ!” she said, laughing, as he hesitated.

“There’s never been anything—­anything to tell you—­or your father, if he was here,” Peter said, flushed and a trifle awkward, “I’m not that kind of a man.  I was a crippled kid, as you know, all for books and music and walks and older people.  But there has been that one thing—­that one woman—­”

Flushed, too, she was looking at him with bright, intelligent eyes.

“But I thought she never even knew—­”

“No, she never did!”

Alix looked back at the gulls.

“Oh, well, then—­” she said, indifferently.

“Alix, would you like to know about her?” Peter said bravely.  “Her name—­and everything?”

“Oh, no, please, I’d much rather not!” she intercepted him hastily, and after a pause she added, “Our marriage isn’t the usual marriage, in that way.  I mean I’m not jealous, and I’m not going to cry my eyes out because there was another woman—­is another woman, who meant more to you, or might have!  I’m going into it with my eyes wide open, Peter.  I know you love me, and I love you, and we both like the same things, and that’s enough.”

Three weeks later he remembered the moment, and asked her again.  They were in the valley house now, and a bitter storm was whirling over the mountain.  Peter’s little cabin rocked to the gale, but they were warm and comfortable beside the fire; the room was lamp-lighted, scented by Alix’s sweet single violets, white and purple, spilling themselves from a glass bowl, and by Peter’s pipe, and by the good scent of green bay burning.  The Joyces had had a happy day, had climbed the hills under a lowering sky, had come home to dry clothes and to cooking, for Kow was away, and had finally shared an epicurean meal beside the fire.

Peter was wrapped in deep content; the companionship of this normal, pretty woman, her quick words and quick laugh, her music, her glancing, bright interest in anything and everything, was the richest experience of his life.  She had said that she would change nothing in his home, but her clever white fingers had changed everything.  There was order now, there was charming fussing and dusting, there were flowers in bowls, and books set straight, and there was just the different little angle to piano and desk and chairs and tables that made the cabin a home at last.  She wanted bricks for a path; he had laughed at her fervent, “Do give me a whole carload of bricks for Christmas, Peter!” She wanted bulbs to pot.  He had lazily suggested that they open the town house while carpenters and painters remade the cabin, but she had protested hotly, “Oh, do let’s keep it just as it always was!”