She buried her head on his shoulder, and he put his arm about her, and there was utter silence over the great brooding mountain, and in the valley brimming with soft moonshine, and in the garden. "I believe that even Alix will understand," Peter said after awhile. "She loves you and me better than any one else in the world; she is not only everything that is generous, but she isn't selfish, she is the busiest and the most sensible person I ever knew. I know--of course I know it's rotten," he broke off in sudden despair, "but what I'm trying to say is that Alix, of all people I know, is the one that will make the least fuss about it--" Cherry was staring raptly before her; now she grasped his hand and said breathlessly: "Oh, Peter, are we talking about it? Are we talking about our going away, and belonging to each other?" "What else?" he said, quick tears in his eyes. "Oh, but I've been so unhappy, I've been so starved!" she whispered. "I thought I wanted people--cities--I thought I wanted to go on the stage. But it was only you that I wanted. Oh, Peter, what a life it will be! The littlest cottage, the simplest life, and perhaps a beach or woods to walk in--and always talking, reading, always together. I never want to come back; I never want to see any one; I never want anything but that." "France it must be, I think," he said, "for then we can go about--no one will know us---" "But we will meet people we know in the trains, going," Cherry said, suddenly. "I know what I am doing," she added, "but that would be so hard, to have them identify us, perhaps come up to us, whisper and point!" "But why not go by sea?" he mused, "why not to Japan and through India, and so on to France?" "No!" she said quickly. "On a long sea-trip someone would surely know us--isn't there some way we can get away, disappear as if we had never been?" "Cherry!" he said, kneeling before her in the wet grass. "You know what it means!" "It means you!" she answered, after a silence. She had laid her hands softly about his neck, and her shining eyes were close to his. "And you trust me?" he whispered. "You know that when I am free and you are free--" She put her fingers over his mouth. "Peter! Haven't I known you ever since I was little enough to sit in your lap and have you read 'Lady Jane' to me? It's so beautiful--it's so wonderful--to love this way," she said, in her innocent, little-girl voice, "that it seems to me the only thing in the world! I'd come to you, Peter, if it meant shame and death and horror. It doesn't mean that, it only means a man and a woman settling down somewhere in the south of France, a big quiet man who limps a little, and a little yellow-headed woman in blue smocks and silly-looking hats--" "It means life, of course!" he interrupted her. "The hour that makes you mine, Cherry, will be the exquisite hour of my whole life!"