"I hardly know what he thinks!" she answered, with a fluttered air. "I've hardly known what I was doing or saying! He was to go to-morrow, you know. But I told him that I wanted to get the whole house in perfect order, in case Alix should ever find a tenant. We've worked like beavers there!" "I know you have!" He smiled down at her, Peter's kind and radiant smile. "After day after day after to-morrow," he said, "I shall see to it that you never work too hard again!" "Oh, Peter--you'll never be sorry?" she whispered. "Sorry! My dearest child, when you give your beauty and your youth to a man almost twice your age, who has loved you all your life--do you think there is much chance of it?" "Why SHOULDN'T it be one of the happy--marriages?" said Cherry after a silence. "It will," he answered, confidently. "My dearest girl, I know something of life and its disappointments and disillusionments! And I tell you that I know that every hour you and I have together is going to be more wonderful than the hour before! I tell you that as the weeks become months, and the months become years, and the beauty and miracle of it go on and on, we will think that what we feel for each other now is only the shadow--the dream!" "But the beginning will be wonderful enough!" Cherry mused. "You and I, breakfasting together, walking together, talking together, always just we two! But, Peter," she said, suddenly, "one of us might die!" "Ah, THAT," he conceded, soberly, "that! It's all I'm afraid of, now!" "I am terribly afraid of it!" said Cherry, beginning to tremble. "If you should die now, before Sunday! I never thought of it before--" "You mustn't think of it now, and I won't!" he said, quickly. "Why, we have only two days to wait--!" "Only two!" she echoed, nervously. "I promised him to-night that I would write to his mother about our coming--" "You talk as if you meant to go with Martin!" he said, smiling. "I know I do, sometimes, and that's one of the things that worries me!" she answered, quickly. "So many things have happened, and I get so confused, thinking," she went on, "that I am all mixed most of the time! I arrange one thing as if I were going to do what Martin thinks I am--go with him to Portland, I mean--at another time I'll get into long talks with Alix of what divorces would mean, and all the time I am straining toward you--and escape from it all! It worries and frightens and puzzles me so," she confided, raising her lovely eyes to him, "that I am almost afraid to speak at all for fear of betraying myself!" "Don't speak at all then!" he answered, smiling whimsically. "Shall I just let him think I am quietly going away with him on Monday?" she asked, after a silence in which she was deeply thinking. "Does he know you had that letter?" Peter said. "No; Alix is going to speak to him about it." Cherry outlined the talk that she and her sister had had at breakfast.