surely, steadily, to the other hour to-night when she had been
kissed, and had kissed in return.

Nobody dreamed it, she told herself with innocent exultation,
looking at Alix, sunk into her chair ungracefully, and at Anne,
peacefully sewing. They thought of her as a child--she, who was
engaged to be married!

"So--we walk home with young men?" mused the doctor, smiling.
"Look here, girls, this little Miss Muffet will be cutting you
both out with that young man, if you're not careful!"

Alix, deep in her story, did not hear him, but Anne smiled
faintly, and faintly frowned as she shook her head. She considered
Cherry sufficiently precocious without Uncle Lee's ill-considered
tolerance. Anne had often told him that Cherry was the "pink-and-
white type" that would attract "boys" soon enough without any
encouragement from him. But he persisted in regarding her as
nothing more than a captivating baby!

He would have had them always children, this tender, simple,
innocent Doctor Strickland. He was in many ways a child himself.
He had never made money in his profession; he and his wife and the
two tiny girls had had a hard enough struggle sometimes. Anne and
her own father had joined the family eight years ago, in the same
year that the Strickland Patent Fire Extinguisher, over which the
doctor had been puttering for years, had been sold. It did not
sell, as his neighbours believed, for a million dollars, but for
perhaps one tenth of that sum. It was enough, and more than
enough, whatever it was. After Anne's father died it meant that