But he had not reckoned on Cherry.  She twisted in her chair, and he heard a child’s long, happy sigh.

“Oh, so am I tired, too!” she breathed, reluctantly.  “I hate to leave it—­but I’ve been almost asleep for half an hour!  You can have all the moonlight there is, Peter.”  Her white figure fluttered toward the door.  “Good-night!” she said, drooping her little head to choke a yawn.  A moment later he heard her laughing with Alix.

“You fool—­you fool—­you fool!” Peter said to himself, and he felt an emotion like shame, a little real compunction that he could so utterly misread her innocence.  He felt it not only wrong in him, but somehow staining and hurtful to her.

CHAPTER XIII

Again Peter reckoned without Cherry.  It was only the next day, when he was entering the Palace court for his lunch, that he experienced a sudden and violent emotion.  His thoughts were, at the moment, far from Cherry, and he had fancied himself in a hurry.  But every other feeling but excitement was obliterated at the sight of a slender, girlishly made woman, in a pongee gown, and a limp brown hat covered with poppies, waiting in the lounge.

Peter went toward her, and the colour rushed into Cherry’s face.  Half a dozen women had been furtively studying her, and one of them now said to a man, “Yes, she really is—­extraordinarily pretty.”  But Cherry and Peter saw and heard them not.  It was the first time they had accidentally encountered each other, and it had a special place of its own in the history of their lives.

The surprise of it kept them laughing, hands clasped, for a minute; then Cherry said: 

“I was to lunch here with Mary Cameron.  But she’s full twenty minutes late!”

“Lunch with me,” Peter substituted, promptly.

“She’ll probably be along—­” Cherry said, vaguely, looking at a clock.  “You hate her, don’t you?” she added, looking up from under the poppies at Peter.

“I don’t like her,” he admitted, with a boy’s grimace.

“Then suppose we don’t lunch here?” Cherry suggested, innocently.  Peter laughed joyously, and tucking her little gloved hand under his arm, led her away.  They went to Solari’s, and had a window table, and nodded, as they discussed their lunch, at half a dozen friends who chanced to be lunching there, too.  But it was a thrilling adventure, none the less, and after the other tables were empty, and when the long room was still, they talked on, trifling with cheese and crackers, Peter watching her as he smoked, Cherry’s head bent over her plate.

She had said that she wanted to tell him “all about it,” and Peter, with quick knowledge that she meant the unhappiness of her marriage, nodded a grave permission.

“I’ve made a failure of it!” Cherry said, sadly.  “I know I ought to struggle on, but I can’t.  Just a few days of it, just a few weeks of it make me—­make me a different woman!  I get nervous, I get hysterical, I don’t sleep!  I have no individuality, Peter, I have no personality!  As for my dignity—­my privacy—­”