the doctor could live on in the brown house under the redwoods,
with his girls, reading, fussing with a new invention, walking,
consulting with Anne, laughing at Alix, and spoiling his youngest-
born.

The house was shingled, low, framed in wide porches, smelling
within and without of the sweet woods about it. Here the
Stricklands weathered the cold, damp winters, when the trees
dripped and the creeks swelled, and here they watched the first
emerald of spring breaking through the loam of a thousand autumns;
here they hunted for iris and wild lilac in April, and hung
Japanese lanterns through the long, warm summers. It was a perfect
life for the old man; it was only lately that he begun uneasily to
suspect that they would some day want something more, that they
would some day tire of empty forest and blowing mountain ridge,
and go away from the shadow of Mt. Tamalpais, and into the world.

Anne, now--was she beginning to fancy this young Lloyd? Doctor
Strickland was surprised with the fervour with which he repudiated
the thought. Anne had been admired, she must go to her own home
some day. But her uncle hoped that it would be a neighbouring
home; this young engineer, who had drifted already into a dozen
different and distant places, was not the man for staid little
Anne. He was twenty-eight years old, but it was not the
discrepancy in years that mattered. The doctor had himself been
twelve years older than his wife. No, it was something less
tangible--

"What did you want to see Mr. Lloyd about to-morrow, Dad?" Cherry
interrupted his thoughts to ask.