"Aren't you home early?" said Doctor Strickland, rubbing his cheek
against his youngest daughter's cheek in sleepy content. He was
never quite happy unless all three girls were in his sight, but
for this girl he had always felt an especial protecting fondness.
It seemed only yesterday that Cherry, a rosy-cheeked sturdy little
girl in a checked gingham apron, had been trotting off to school;
to him it was yesterday that she had been a squarely-built baby,
digging in the garden paths, and sniffing at the border pinks. He
had followed her exquisite childhood with more than a father's
usual devotion, perhaps because she really had been an
exceptionally endearing child, perhaps because she had been given
him, a tiny crying thing in a blanket, to fill the great gap her
mother's going had left in his heart. He had sympathized with her
microscopic cut fingers, he had smiled into her glowing, damp
little face when she stuttered to him long tales of bad doggies
and big 'ticks; he had brought her "jacks" and paper-dolls and
hair ribbons; he loved the diminutive femininity of the creature;
she was all a woman, even at three. Alix he proudly called his
"boy"; Alix used hair ribbons to tie up her dogs, and demanded hip
boots and an air rifle and got them, too, and used them, but when
he took Alix in his arms she was apt to bump his nose violently
with her hard young head, to break his glasses, or at best to
wriggle herself free. Little Cherry, however, was 'fraid of dogs,
she told her father, and of guns, and she would curl up in his
arms for happy half-hours, with her gold curls sprayed against his
shoulder, and her soft little hand tucked into his own.

"Mr. Lloyd had to take the nine o'clock train," Cherry answered
her father dreamily, "and he and Peter walked home with me!" She
did not add that Peter had left them at his own turning, a quarter