Sisters | Page 7

with compliments is the right partner for life! Alix,
now--somehow she wasn't like Cherry, at eighteen."
He smiled at a sudden memory of Alix, who was chicken-farming at
that age, and generally unpleasantly redolent of incubators, chopped
feed, and mire. He seemed to remember Alix shouting that if Peter
Joyce was going to LIVE in their house, she would move somewhere
else! Cherry was different.
Cherry, he reflected fearfully, was as pretty as her mother had been at
eighteen, with the same rounded chin and apricot cheeks, and the same
shadowed innocent blue eyes with a film of corn- coloured hair blown
across them. She had the strange, the indefinable quality that without
words, almost without glances, draws youth toward youth, draws
admiration and passion, draws life and all its pain. Her father for the
first time to-night formulated in his heart the thought that she might be
happily married--
Married--nonsense! Why, what did she know of life, of submission and

courage and sacrifice? At the first strain, at the first real test, she would
want to run home to her Daddy again, to "stop playing"--! It would be
years, many years, before the snowy frills, and the pale gold head, and
the firm, brown little hand would be ready for that!
Not many hours after he went slowly up to bed morning began to creep
into the little valley. The redwoods turned gray, and then dark green,
the fog stirred, and a first shaft of bright sunlight struck across a
shoulder of the hills, and pierced the shadows about the brown
bungalow. Alix, at her early bath, heard quail calling, and looked out to
see the last of the fog vanishing at eight o'clock, and to get a wet rush
of fragrance from the Persian lilac, blooming this year for the first time.
At half-past eight she came out into the garden, to find her father
somewhat ruefully studying the tumbled ruins of the yellow banksia
rose. The garden was still wet, but warming fast; she picked a plume of
dark and perfumed heliotrope, and began to fasten it in his coat lapel
while she kissed him.
"We'll never get that back on the roof, my dear boy," Alix said
maternally.
Her father pursed his lips, shook his head doubtfully. The rose, a short,
week ago, had been spreading fan-like branches well toward the
ridge-pole, a story and a half above their heads. But the great wind of
yestereve that had ended the spring and brought in the summer had
dragged it from its place and flung it, a jumble of emerald leaves and
sweet clusters of creamy blossoms, across the path and the steps of the
porch. Alix looked up at the outward curve of the reversed branches,
bent almost to the splitting point in the unfamiliar direction, and
whistled. She tentatively tugged at a loose spray, and stood biting her
thumb.
"Why it should have kept its place for fifteen years and then suddenly
flopped, is a mystery to me!" she observed resentfully.
"Well, the truth is," her father confessed, "you were quite right last
night. When I pruned it, a week ago, I may have undermined it."

"You never will listen to reason!" his daughter remarked absently, her
attention distracted by the setter puppy who came clumsily gambolling
toward her. "Hello, old Bumpydoodles!" she added, with rich affection,
kissing the dog's silky head, and burying both hands in his feathered
collar. "Hello, old Buck!"
"Alexandra, for heaven's sake stop handling that brute!" said Peter
Joyce disgustedly, coming up the path. "I dare say you've not had your
breakfast, either. Go wash your hands! 'Morning, Doctor!"
Father and daughter turned to smile upon him, a tall, lean man, with a
young face and a finely groomed head, and with touches of premature
silver at his temples. He was very much at home here, had been their
closest friend for many years.
He was a bachelor, just entering his thirties, a fastidious, critical,
exacting man by reputation, but showing his best side to the Stricklands.
They had a vague idea that he was rich, according to their modest
standard, but he apparently had no extravagant tastes, and lived as
quietly, or more quietly, than they did. He had a brown cabin, up on the
mountain, where two or three Portuguese boys and an old, fat Chinese
cook managed his affairs, and he sometimes spoke of friends at the club,
or brought two or three men home with him for a visit. But for the most
part he liked solitude, books, music, dogs, and his fireside. The old
doctor's one social enjoyment was in visiting Peter, and the younger
man went to no other place so steadily as he came to the old house
under the redwoods.
The girls accepted him