He sighed, smiled, and got to his feet. "That's not in our hands," he said, cheerfully.
Alix, without moving, sent her glance from his face to Peter's, and their eyes met. Only a few words, spoken half in earnest, on a spring morning tramp, and yet they had their place, in her memory and Peter's, and were to return to them after a time, and influence them more seriously than either the man, or the grinning girl, or the old man himself ever dreamed.
The glance lasted only a second, then Alix, who had been carefully removing burrs from the soft tangle of the dog's tasselled ears, took the trail again with great, boyish springs of her bloomered legs.
"Father," said she, "am I to understand that you disapprove of my choice?"
"I hope," her father answered, seriously, "that when you do marry you will get a man half as good as Peter!"
"Thank you!" Peter said, gravely, more as a rebuke to the incorrigible Alix than because he was giving the conversation much attention.
Alix had time for no comment, for at this moment she placed her foot upon an unsubstantial root and slid down upon the two men with such an unpremeditated rush of heavy boots, wet loam, loosened rocks, and cascading earth, that the footing of them all was threatened, and it was only after much shouting, staggering, balancing, and clutching that they resumed their climb. Peter was then nursing a wrist that had been wrenched in the confusion, looking away from it only to give the loudly singing Alix an occasional resentful glance.
"You could omit some of those cries!" he presently observed.
"I thought you liked 'The Lotos Flower'?" Alix called back.
"I just proved that I do," Peter said neatly, and the doctor, and Alix herself, laughed joyously.