"All right--you write and ask him!" Martin agreed, good-naturedly. Cherry was surprised at his attitude, but grateful more than surprised. "Not cross, Mart?" she asked. "Not the least in the world!" he answered, lightly. "Because I truly believe that we'd both be happier--" the woman said, hesitatingly. Martin did not answer. The next day she sat down to write her father. The house was still. Red Creek was awakening in the heavenly October coolness, children chattered on the way to school, the morning and evening were crisp and sharp. Cherry stared out at a field of stubble bathed in soft sunshine. The hills to-day were only a shade deeper than the pale sky. Along the road back of the house a lumber wagon rattled, the thin bay horses galloping joyously in harness. Pink and white cosmos, pallid on clouds of frail, bushy green, were banked in the shade of the woodshed. She meditated, with a troubled brow. Her letter was unexpectedly hard to compose. She could not take a bright and simple tone, asking her father to rejoice in her home-coming. Somehow the matter persisted in growing heavy, and the words twisted themselves about into ugly and selfish sounds. Cherry was young, but even to her youth the phrases, the "misunderstood" and the "uncongenial," the "friendly parting before any bitterness creeps in," and the "free to decide our lives in some happier and wiser way," rang false. Pauline had been divorced, a few years ago, and the only thing Cherry disliked in her friend was her cold and resentful references to her first husband. No, she couldn't be a divorced woman. It was all spoiled, the innocent past and the future; there was no way out! She gave up the attempt at a letter, and began to annoy Martin with talk of a visit home again. "You were there six months ago!" Martin reminded her. "Eight months ago, Mart." "What you want to go for?" "Oh, just--just--" Cherry's irrepressible tears angered herself almost as much as they did Martin. "I think they'd like me to!" she faltered. "Go if you want to!" he said, but she knew she could not go on that word. "That's it," she said at last to herself, in one of her solitary hours. "I'm married, and this is marriage. For the rest of my life it'll be Mart and I--Mart and I--in everything! For richer for poorer, for better for worse-that's marriage. He doesn't beat me, and we have enough money, and perhaps there are a lot of other women worse off than I am. But it's--it's funny." CHAPTER IX In January, however, he came home one noon to find her hatted and wrapped to go. "Oh, Mart--it's Daddy!" she said. "He's ill--I've got to see him! He's awfully ill." "Telegram?" asked Martin, not particularly pleased, but not unsympathetic either. For answer she gave him the yellow paper that was wet with her tears. "Dad ill," he read. "Don't worry. Come if you can. Alix." "I'll bet it's a put-up job between you and Alix--" Martin said in indulgent suspicion.