The evening was warm, one of the two or three warm evenings that marked the height of summer even in the high valley.  While the three sat on the wide, unroofed porch, loitering over their coffee, a great, yellow-red moon rose slowly over the hill, and floated silently above them.  Presently its light flooded the landscape, and strange and romantic vistas appeared between the redwoods aisles, and the tops of the forest trees far below them showed in a brilliant gray light, soft and furry.  The whole world seemed to be lifted and swimming in vaporous brightness.  There was not a breath of air in the garden; roses and wallflowers stood erect in a sort of luminous enchantment.  Moonlight sank through the low twisted branches of the near-by oaks and fell tangled with black and lacy shade through the porch rose vine.

Alix sat on the porch rail, every line of crisp skirt and braided head revealed as if by daylight, but Cherry’s pale striped gown was only a glimmer in the deepest shade of the vine.  Peter, smoking, sat where he could not but see her; they had hardly looked at each other directly since the long, strange look of this afternoon; they had exchanged hardly a word.

A black cat crept across the grass, her body dragging stealthily on crouched legs, boldly silhouetted in the moonshine, invisible in the shade.  Alix defeated her hunting plans by flinging a well-aimed pebble into the shrubbery ahead of her.  The cat, dissembling, lay down in the dry grass, cleaned a paw, and coquetted with her tail.

“Town to-morrow, Pete?” Alix said, after a silence during which she had locked her arms behind her head, stared straight above her at the path the moon was making through faint stars, and yawned.  “I’ve got to go in to a meeting of the hospital board.”

“I didn’t know you were on it,” Cherry said.

“Peter’s mother was, and hence I am,” Alix said, virtuously.  Cherry felt an old little prick of jealousy.  Alix was strangely indifferent to the position she held.

“I go in to have luncheon with Mary” Cherry said.  “I wish we could all lunch together!”

“I’ll blow you girls to a meal at Frank’s—­” Peter began, and interrupted himself, “Oh, but you can’t, Cherry!”

“And our meeting is at twelve; we’ll have lunch at the hospital,” Alix added.  “Wouldn’t you think we’d have enough of each other, we three?” she said, amusedly, beginning, in the reprehensible manner of girlhood, to roll the black scarf that had been knotted about her rolled bluejacket’s collar, and to remove the pins from her hair.  “But I hate to be in town and not see you both!  Good-night, beloveds.  I’m dead.  Don’t sit out here mooning with Pete all night, Cerise!”

Peter said to himself that now Cherry would go, too, but as the screen door banged lightly after Alix, and the dull glimmer of Cherry’s striped gown did not move in the soft shadow, a sudden reluctance and distaste seized him.  He had been subconsciously aware of her all afternoon; he had known a delicious warmth and stir at his heart that he had not analyzed, if indeed it could be analyzed.  Now suddenly he did not want the beauty and bloom and charm of that feeling touched.  His heart began to beat heavily again, and he knew that he must stop the unavailing game now.