skies.

June passed; July passed; it was hot at the "Emmy Younger." August
came in on a furnace breath; Cherry felt headachy, languid, and
half sick all the time. She hated housekeeping in this weather;
hated the smells of dry tin sink and wooden floor, of milk bottles
and lard tins. Martin had said that he could not possibly get
away, even for the week of Anne's wedding, but Cherry began to
wonder if he would let her go alone.

"If he doesn't, I shall be sick!" she fretted to herself, in a
certain burning noontime, toward the middle of August. Blazing
heat had been pouring over the mine since six o'clock; there
seemed to have been no night. Martin, who had been playing poker
the night before, was sleeping late this morning. He was proud of
the little wife who so generously spared him for an occasional
game, and always allowed him to sleep far into the following
morning. Other wives at the mine were not so amiable where poker
was concerned. But Martin, coming home at three o'clock, dazed
with close air and cigar smoke, had awakened his wife to tell her
that he would be "dead" in the morning, and Cherry had accordingly
crept about her own dressing noiselessly, had darkened the
bedroom, and eaten her own breakfast without the clatter of a
dish, putting the coffee aside to be reheated for him when he
awakened. Now she was sitting by the window, panting in the noon
heat, and looking down upon a dazzle of dust and ugliness and
smothering hotness. She was thinking, as it chanced, of the big
forest at home, and of a certain day--just one of their happy
days!--only a year ago, when she had lain for a dreamy hour on the
soft forest floor, staring up idly through the laced fanlike