debated the propriety of doing so, in her heart.

Not since the days of her engagement to Martin, and then only on a
few occasions, had she felt the thrill that she experienced now,
when Pauline, with her dark eyes and her frilly parasol, wandered
in the kitchen door, to sit laughing and talking for a few
minutes, or when she herself dressed and crossed the village, and
went up past the packing plant and the storage barns to the two
small cement gate posts and the length of rusty chain that marked
the entrance to Red Creek "Park." Then there would be tea, poetry,
talk, and the flattery that Pauline quite deliberately applied to
Cherry, and the flattery that Cherry all unconsciously lavished on
her friend in return.

Pauline read Browning, Francis Thompson, and Pater, and introduced
Cherry to new worlds of thought. She talked to Cherry of New York,
which she loved, and of the men and women she had met there. She
sometimes sighed and pushed the bright hair back from Cherry's
young and innocent and discontented little face, and said,
tenderly, "On the stage, my dear--anywhere, everywhere, you would
be a furore!"

And thinking, in the quiet evenings--for Martin's work kept him
later and later at the mine--Cherry came to see that her marriage
had been a great mistake. She had not been ready for marriage. She
would sit on the back steps, as the evenings grew cooler, and
watch the exquisite twilight fade, and the sorrow and beauty of
life would wring her heart.

Darkness came, the Turner children shrieked, laughed, clattered