Smiling, he gave her her way.  She amused him day after day.  He watched her, marvelling at the miracle that was woman.  He heard her in the kitchen, interrogating the Chinese:  “You show me picture your little boy!” He heard her inveigling Antone, the old Italian labourer, into confidences.

Tonight he watched her in great satisfaction; he liked to have her here in his home, one of the pretty Stricklands, Peter Joyce’s wife.  Nobody else was here, nobody else belonged here, they were masters of their own lives.  She quite captivated him by her simplicity and frankness; she washed her masses of brown hair and shook it loose in the sunshine, and she came in wet more than once, and changed her shoes before the fire—­just as she had years ago, when she was a madcap little girl running wild through the woods.

They had been talking of Cherry, as they often did.  Alix’s favourite topic was her little sister; she had almost a maternal pride and fondness where Cherry was concerned.  Today she had been house-cleaning, and had brought some treasures downstairs.  She had showed Peter Cherry’s old exercise books:  “Look, Peter, how she put faces in the naughts and turned the sevens into little sail-boats!  And see the straggling letters—­’Charity Strickland!’ I’ve always hated to destroy them.  She was such a lazy, cunning little scholar!”

Peter, smiling at the old books, had remembered her, a small, square Cherry, with a film of gold falling over a blazing cheek, and mutinous blue eyes.  Ah—­the wonderful eyes were wonderful even then—­

The date gave him a moment’s shock.  Only eight—­only seven years ago she had been a schoolgirl!  Cherry was not yet twenty-three—­

“I wish she had married a little differently,” Alix said, thoughtfully.  “Cherry isn’t exacting.  But she does like pretty gowns and pretty rooms, and to do things as other girls do!”

“You should have married the mining engineer,” he told her.  “Red Creek would have had no terrors for you!

“I should have loved it!” she agreed, carelessly.

A curious expression flashed into her face.  She was smiling; but immediately the smile faded, and she looked back at the fire with puzzled eyes.

“If I loved a man, Peter, the place and the house and the money wouldn’t matter much!” she answered after awhile, in a slightly strained voice.

“Perhaps,” he suggested, still thinking of Cherry, “that’s the trouble!”

She gave him a quick, almost frightened look.

“The—­the trouble?” she stammered.  And with a little ashamed laugh she added, “What trouble?”

For a long time he looked at her in silence, at first puzzled, gradually fitting meaning and interpretation to his words and her own.  Presently their eyes met, and with her little gruff boyish laugh she came over to the low seat at his knee.

“You see that there is something just a little wrong, then?” she asked.