The early tea was over, and long shadows were falling as the little party broke up. The three girls were still debating what sort of ice cream they should make, when just beyond the gate a neighbour, driving by, offered Mr. Erskine a seat in his buggy. Then Magnus turned to his sisters. "Stay here, you girls," he said. "I have to speak to Cherry very seriously; and I doubt if she likes to be lectured before people. Run in." The girls laughed and obeyed; but perhaps Cherry did not choose to wait for lectures, nor mean to have them, for she spoke first. They were going slowly up the hill, Magnus falling into the West Point saunter, to which Cherry rather unwillingly conformed. "We are walking very slow," she ventured. "And you used to walk so fast." "West Point style. The very first day they impressed it upon my mind that fast walkers want to get somewhere. And, Cerise, just now I do not." "Magnus," she said suddenly, "what did you really mean by a 'storm flag'?" "Ah!" said Cadet Kindred, in a tone of deep satisfaction, "now I have got it. I thought it could not be long before Cherry would take me in hand." "But whatever did you mean?" "Come over here and sit down," he said, drawing her away from the path to a rock among the trees, and laying himself at her feet. "Now what was it I said in that unfortunate letter?" "It was not unfortunate," said Cherry, "for we were very glad to get it; only that puzzled us. You said you kept some sort of a storm flag flying. And we did not know what a storm flag might be." Magnus looked down for a moment in silence. "No wonder," he said, "for the idea is something that never came into your true heart. You know what it means to strike your colours?" "Yes--oh, yes!" "And what it is to keep them flying,--for you do it every day." "And I thought that must be what you meant," said Cherry. "You did not like to call your flag a big one, but it was always bravely flying." "I meant more than that--or less," said Magnus. "Cerise, a storm flag is a sort of between thing. It may blow pretty hard, you think, and so you haul down your beautiful fair-weather banner and run up another that costs less; a little, little strip of bunting that hardly shows it is there. You know it is; and once in a while, in a good light, you can see the colours; but that is about all. It does not encourage the world much, and tells of hard weather more than of victory and joy. Do you understand now, dear girl?" Cherry was looking at him with the keenest attention; the pulsations of colour came and went. "But, Magnus," she began. "Yes, Chérie. Say whatever comes into your heart to say." "Then there is a little short time every now and then when the colours are really down?" "Yes. And the harder the gale, the longer it takes to get them up again. It is often slow work, anyhow," said Magnus, with some bitterness at himself. Cherry sat silent, looking down.