Soft silken hours,
Open suns, shady bowers;
'Bove all, nothing within that lowers.
—Crashaw.
Magnus was as good as his word, and stayed all day. What though Cherry was summarily sent off, after the early dinner, to sleep away the effects of her headache. Whether she slept or not I would not dare say; but certainly Magnus talked, and kept Mr. Erskine well amused, till she appeared again.
But he gave not a hint of the morning's work; about that, both parties most interested held their peace. I think they both craved silence for a while, and so kept in hiding; not ready yet to hear common tongues discuss the new-found wonder of the world. Cherry had been too shaken and bruised—there were too many sharp details still vividly in sight—for her to go straight to her father, as perhaps at another time she might have done; she needed to steady her own thoughts first. And for Magnus, too, the morning had been a hard one, even with its culmination of joy. Besides, counting Cherry his own from that time forward, the small ceremony of asking for her could well wait. Probably Mr. Erskine needed no telling how things stood. And if it were indeed a secret, what fun to keep it such! He wanted no words on the subject, just now, save from Cherry herself. Not yet.
All the family from the other house came up the hill to tea next day, but saw nothing new. If Cherry was more quiet than usual, that was not strange, after such a headache; and if Cadet Kindred, on the other hand, was as full of pranks as the veriest boy could be, it was not such an unheard-of thing as to draw any special attention. One thing they might have seen, that his mischief and frolic never came near Cherry; towards her his manner was a silent devotion of the most tender and serious sort, but he kept everyone else in such a breeze that no one gave heed.
Speeding back from the post-office with a handful of letters, Magnus announced that Messrs. Twinkle and Rig—alias Cadets Starr and McLean—were coming to make him a visit in the course of their furlough wanderings, and everybody at once went into committee on the proper and possible means of delighting them.
Magnus, indeed, turned off the matter very easily.
"It is done to your hand," he affirmed. "Mother's cake and pies and bread and butter—with two girls—would make the average cadet almost too happy to support life."
"Two girls!" Rose commented. "You seem to leave Cherry out."
"I did—that's a fact," Magnus said, with a queer gesture. "But then you also leave me out, and I am a third cadet; so it's all right. She'll not stand in the cold."
"I do not think she will, if the others have any sense," said Rose.