Sisters | Page 5

and rested her untidy head against
his knee.
"Anne aided and abetted me!" said the doctor meekly.
"To the extent of handing you your shears!" Anne said promptly.
"No, but really you know, Dad, you were a pig-headed little creature to
do that!" Alix said musically. "You might just as well cut it down at the
roots and plant another double banksia."
"I rather thought that Lloyd might have some idea of a tackle--or a
derrick or something--" submitted her father vaguely.
"Well, if anybody can--" Anne conceded, laughing. "What did he say

about coming over, Cherry?"
But Cherry had not been listening, and the conversation was reviewed
for her benefit. She remarked, between two rending yawns, that Mr.
Lloyd was coming over to-morrow at ten o'clock, and Peter, too--
"Peter won't be much good!" Alix commented. Cherry looked at her
reproachfully.
"You're awfully mean to Peter, lately!" she protested. Her father gave
her a shrewd look, with his good-night kiss, and immediately afterward
both the younger girls dragged their way up to bed.
Alix and Cherry shared a bare, woody-smelling room tucked away
under brown eaves. The walls were of raw pine, the latticed windows,
in bungalow fashion, opened into the fragrant darkness of the night.
The beds were really bunks, and above her bunk each girl had an extra
berth, for occasional guests. There was scant prettiness in the room, and
yet it was full of purity and charm. The girls sat upon their beds while
they were undressing, and plunged upon their knees on the bare pine
floor and rested their elbows upon the faded patchwork quilts while
they said their prayers. Mill Valley was so healthful a little mountain
village that among her two thousand residents there was only one
doctor, the old man who sat by the fire downstairs, and he had formally
retired from general practice. The girls, like all their neighbours, were
hardy, bred to cold baths, long walks, simple hours, and simple food. In
the soft Western climate they left their bedroom windows open the year
round; they liked to wake to winter damp and fog, and go downstairs
with blue finger-tips and chattering teeth, to warm themselves with
breakfast and the fire.
So Alix said nothing when Cherry went to the window to-night, and
knelt at it, looking out into the redwoods, and breathing the piney air.
In the silence of the little room the girls could hear a swollen creek
rushing; rich, loamy odours drifted in from the forest that had been
soaked with long April rains. Cherry saw a streak of light under the
door of Hong's cabin, a hundred yards away; there was no moon, it was
blackness unbroken under the trees. The season was late, but the girls

felt with a rush of delight that summer was with them at last; the air
was soft and warm, and there was a general sense of being freed from
the winter's wetness and heaviness.
Alix rolled herself in a gray army blanket, and was asleep in some sixty
seconds. But Cherry felt that she was floating in seas of new joy and
utter delight, and that she would never be sleepy again.
Downstairs Anne and the doctor sat staidly on, the man dreaming with
a knotted forehead, the girl sewing. Presently she ran a needle through
her fine white work with seven tiny stitches, folded it, and put her
thimble into a case that hung from her orderly workbag with a long
ribbon.
"Wait a minute, Anne," said the doctor, as she straightened herself to
rise. "This young Lloyd, now--what do YOU think of him?"
She widened demure blue eyes.
"Should you be sorry if I--liked him, Uncle Lee?" she smiled.
The old man rumpled his silver hair restlessly.
"No-o," he said, a little ruefully. "I suppose it'll be some man some day,
my dear. I've been thinking--even little Cherry seems to be growing
up!"
Anne, who modelled her deportment somewhat upon the conduct of
Esther in "Bleak House," came to the hassock at his knee, and sat there,
looking up at him with bright affection and respect.
"Cherry's only a child," she assured him, "and Alix will not be ready to
give her heart to any man for years to come! But I'm twenty-four,
Uncle. And sometimes I feel ready to--to try my own wings!"
He smiled at her absently; he was thinking of her mother, an articulate,
academic, resolute woman, of whom he had never been fond.
"That's the way the wind blows, eh?" he asked kindly.

Anne widened her pretty eyes.
"Well--you see how much he's here! You see the flowers and books
and notes. I'm not the sort of girl to wear my heart on my sleeve," Anne,
who was fond of small conservational tags, assured him merrily.