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after dinner, her father made her tumble it down in a golden
mop again. "Can't lose my last girl, you know," he said to Mrs. North,
Martin's aunt, seriously. Martin had been shown her birthday gifts:
books and a silver belt buckle and a gold pen and stationery and
handkerchiefs. A day or two later she had had another gift; had opened
the tiny Shreve box with a sudden hammering at her heart, with a
presage of delight. She had found a silver-topped candy jar, and the
card of Mr. John Martin Lloyd, and under the name, in tiny letters, the
words "O fudge!" The girls laughed over this nonsense appreciatively,
but there was more than laughter in Cherry's heart.
From that moment the world was changed. Her father, her sister, her
cousin had second place, now. Cherry had put out her innocent little
hand, and had opened the gate, and had passed through it into the world.
That hour was the beginning, and it had led her surely, steadily, to the
other hour to-night when she had been kissed, and had kissed in return.
Nobody dreamed it, she told herself with innocent exultation, looking
at Alix, sunk into her chair ungracefully, and at Anne, peacefully
sewing. They thought of her as a child--she, who was engaged to be
married!

"So--we walk home with young men?" mused the doctor, smiling.
"Look here, girls, this little Miss Muffet will be cutting you both out
with that young man, if you're not careful!"
Alix, deep in her story, did not hear him, but Anne smiled faintly, and
faintly frowned as she shook her head. She considered Cherry
sufficiently precocious without Uncle Lee's ill-considered tolerance.
Anne had often told him that Cherry was the "pink-and- white type"
that would attract "boys" soon enough without any encouragement
from him. But he persisted in regarding her as nothing more than a
captivating baby!
He would have had them always children, this tender, simple, innocent
Doctor Strickland. He was in many ways a child himself. He had never
made money in his profession; he and his wife and the two tiny girls
had had a hard enough struggle sometimes. Anne and her own father
had joined the family eight years ago, in the same year that the
Strickland Patent Fire Extinguisher, over which the doctor had been
puttering for years, had been sold. It did not sell, as his neighbours
believed, for a million dollars, but for perhaps one tenth of that sum. It
was enough, and more than enough, whatever it was. After Anne's
father died it meant that the doctor could live on in the brown house
under the redwoods, with his girls, reading, fussing with a new
invention, walking, consulting with Anne, laughing at Alix, and
spoiling his youngest- born.
The house was shingled, low, framed in wide porches, smelling within
and without of the sweet woods about it. Here the Stricklands
weathered the cold, damp winters, when the trees dripped and the
creeks swelled, and here they watched the first emerald of spring
breaking through the loam of a thousand autumns; here they hunted for
iris and wild lilac in April, and hung Japanese lanterns through the long,
warm summers. It was a perfect life for the old man; it was only lately
that he begun uneasily to suspect that they would some day want
something more, that they would some day tire of empty forest and
blowing mountain ridge, and go away from the shadow of Mt.
Tamalpais, and into the world.

Anne, now--was she beginning to fancy this young Lloyd? Doctor
Strickland was surprised with the fervour with which he repudiated the
thought. Anne had been admired, she must go to her own home some
day. But her uncle hoped that it would be a neighbouring home; this
young engineer, who had drifted already into a dozen different and
distant places, was not the man for staid little Anne. He was
twenty-eight years old, but it was not the discrepancy in years that
mattered. The doctor had himself been twelve years older than his wife.
No, it was something less tangible--
"What did you want to see Mr. Lloyd about to-morrow, Dad?" Cherry
interrupted his thoughts to ask.
"The rose vine!" her father reminded her.
"You'll never get that back on the roof!" Alix looked up to assure him
discouragingly. "I told you, when you were pruning it," she added
vivaciously, "that you were cutting too deep. No--you knew it all! Now
the first wind brings it down all over the place, and you get exactly
what you deserve!"
Her tone was less harsh than her words; indeed, it was the tone he loved
from her, that of a devoted but long-suffering mother. She came to
Cherry's hassock, and dropped on it,