“Really, Pete!” Alix asked, with dancing eyes.  “And it means that you can keep the old house, Cerise,” she exclaimed, triumphantly, “and we can be together part of the year anyway!  Oh, come on, everybody, and sit down, and let’s talk and talk about it!  Let me see it again—­’in recognition of all claims against the patent extinguisher aforementioned’—­sit down, Pete, it’s only ten o’clock!  Let’s talk.  Aren’t you simply wild with joy, Cherry?”

But she told Peter later that she had been surprised at Cherry’s quietness; Cherry had looked pale and abstracted, and had not seemed half enthusiastic enough.

“Though very probably,” mused Alix, “it brought back Dad’s death, and saddened her in that way, and more than that, I know she is worried all the time about feeling as she does toward Martin, and perhaps he’ll feel that she ought to put this into some horrible mining scheme!  Cherry is not mercenary, I’ll say that for her.”

“What will you do with all yours?” Peter asked.

“I wish we three could go about the world together,” Alix answered.  “I’d love to see Japan and India—­I’d like to see burning-ghats on the sacred Gunga!” she added, cheerfully.  “But I don’t know—­money doesn’t buy you much!” she yawned.  “Perhaps I’ll go to some Old Ladies’ Home, and give each of the old girls one hundred dollars a quarter—­wouldn’t they have fun, buying scarfs and wool and caps?”

“Their families would immediately remove them, for the revenue,” Peter suggested.  He was grinning at her; he felt suddenly the wholesomeness and safety of her absurdity and originality.  He liked the characteristic earnestness with which, in the very act of snapping off her bedroom light, before going out to the sleeping-porch, she widened her eyes at him, and frowned in concentrated thought.

“Then I’ll give them fifty dollars a quarter!” she decided.  “Just enough to buy them some little things, you know, brass tea-kettles, flannel underwear, whatever they wanted!  Presents—­they must always want to be making Christmas presents.”  And she yawned again.  “Shut your door, Pete, if you read,” she said.  “The light shines against the trees, and it’s right in my eyes!” But ten minutes later he heard her call through the door, “Or I could give it on condition that they stayed in the home and didn’t let their families get it!” and grinned again over his book.

After that there was silence, and gradually the little sounds of the summer night made themselves heard again.  Alix’s light was out.  Cherry came, trailing her thin wrapper, to the porch bed opposite her sister’s bed and slipped into it with only a brief good-night.  But Peter read on deep into the first hours of the morning.

Kow Yu, flinging the striped blue tablecloth over the porch table the next day at the noon hour, and clinking knives and forks, was questioned by his master.

“You go catchem ’nother plate, Kow!” Peter said.