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"A month!" the older sister echoed, indignantly, disappearing kitchenward on some errand. Presently the supper table was laid at Cherry's side, bees shot like bullets through the garden, birds settled for the night. Supper was ready; still there was no haste, no stir, no apparent effort. Alix came to her own porch chair for the long twilight.
But Alix had only one hope for me, and that was that somehow Martin and I would come to be well, to be nearer to each other, and that somehow he and I would make a success of our marriage, would spare well, let's say the family name, from all the disgrace and publicity of a divorce " "And you feel that this has drawn you and Martin nearer together?"
"Yes, and have just as good a time as if she never had been married at all!" he said. "You KNOW " Alix was beginning the denial that she had given him so confidently last night, but she interrupted herself, and stopped short.
Alix looked pale, but fresh and trim; she had evidently just tubbed, and she wore one of the plain, wide-striped ginghams that were extremely becoming to her rather boyish type. She looked up, and nodded at Cherry composedly. Cherry always kissed her sister in the morning, but she did not to-day. She felt troubled and ashamed, and instinctively avoided the little caress.
Alix said, puzzled. "Your note!" Martin explained. "What note! I didn't write any note. Cherry telephoned " "No," he said, patiently and perfunctorily, "you wanted Cherry to-say good-bye to those people who were sailing! That was all. She wrote it; it got there in time, I guess. Anyway, I heard the girl say to rush it to the boat!" "Oh!" Alix said. "Oh " she added.
"I wasn't thinking of Alix just then," said Charlie. The following morning, Courtney went, as was his custom, to the postoffice. He had arranged for a lock-box there. His letters were not brought up to the Tavern by old Jim House, the handy-man. The day was bright and clear and cold; the gale had died in the early morning hours.
Her dark eyes softened and filled with tears as David's mother gently stroked her hair and sought by words to convince her that David would understand. "It wasn't your fault, Alix darling," she protested. "David won't mind, not in the least. Sergeant didn't really mean anything to him. He was yours more than he was David's. Don't you worry about David's feelings, dear. He "
"But, my child," Peter expostulated kindly, "my dear benighted wife there is such a thing as a soul a mind a personality! To be tied to a well, to a coarsening influence day after day is living death! It is worse than any bodily discomfort " "I don't see it!" Alix persisted.
Martin had coarsened in the six years since they had first known him. There had been something unspoiled, vigorous, and fresh about him then that was gone now. Alix sensed that his associates in the mining towns in which he had lived had been men and women of a low type. The defiling influence had left its mark. Missing entertainment in his home, he had sought it elsewhere.
Alix had not young love and novelty to soften the outlines of the "Emmy Younger," and she felt, as she frankly wrote later, to her father, "at last convinced that there is a hell!"
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