“But what made you think he did?” the girl persisted.

“Just a fancy,” he assured her.  “Just an old father’s fear that she is growing up too fast!”

“Because we all, and you especially, spoil her,” Anne reminded him, smiling.  “Peter,” she added thoughtfully, “has kissed us all, now and then!” She stooped for a dutiful good-night kiss, and was gone.  And as she went, lightly and swiftly across the hall, up the stairway with her shoulders erect, and methodically and prettily moved about her brushing and folding and disrobing, she saw herself engaged to be married, saw herself veiled and mystical in white, on her Uncle’s arm, heard the old neighbours and friends saying that little Anne Strickland had gone to her own home, and had won the love of a fine man.

Downstairs, the doctor sat on, thinking, and his face was grave.  He was thinking of little Cherry’s goodnight kiss, half an hour ago.  She had rested against his arm, and he had held her there, but what had been the thoughts behind the blue eyes so near his own?  Perhaps Anne was right—­perhaps Anne was right.  But he realized with a great rush of fear that some man had kissed Cherry to-night, had held her against a tobacco-scented coat, and that the girl was a woman, and an awakened woman at that.  Cherry—­ kissed a man!  Her father’s heart winced away from the thought.

Young Lloyd and Peter had walked home with her.  But if Anne was right in her maidenly suspicions of Lloyd’s intentions, then it must have been Peter who surprised little Cherry with a sudden embrace.  Lloyd had been hurrying for a train, too; the case looked clear for Peter.

And as he came to his conclusions, a certain relief crept into the old man’s heart.  Peter was an odd fellow; he was ten years too old for the child.  But Peter was a lover of books and gardens and woods and music, after all, and Peter’s father and this old man musing by the fire had been “Lee” and “Paul” to each other since boyhood.  Peter might give Cherry a kiss as innocently as a brother; in any case, Peter would wait for her, would be all consideration and tenderness when he did win her.

“But I think perhaps she might go down to the San Jose school for half a term,” her father reflected.  “Six months there did wonders for Alix.  No use precipitating things—­the next few years are pretty important for all the girls.  We mustn’t let her fancy that the first man who turns her head with compliments is the right partner for life!  Alix, now—­somehow she wasn’t like Cherry, at eighteen.”

He smiled at a sudden memory of Alix, who was chicken-farming at that age, and generally unpleasantly redolent of incubators, chopped feed, and mire.  He seemed to remember Alix shouting that if Peter Joyce was going to live in their house, she would move somewhere else!  Cherry was different.

Cherry, he reflected fearfully, was as pretty as her mother had been at eighteen, with the same rounded chin and apricot cheeks, and the same shadowed innocent blue eyes with a film of corn-coloured hair blown across them.  She had the strange, the indefinable quality that without words, almost without glances, draws youth toward youth, draws admiration and passion, draws life and all its pain.  Her father for the first time to-night formulated in his heart the thought that she might be happily married—­