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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Camerons of Highboro, by Beth B. Gilchrist
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Camerons of Highboro
+
+Author: Beth B. Gilchrist
+
+Illustrator: Phillipps Ward
+
+Release Date: November 15, 2009 [EBook #30479]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CAMERONS OF HIGHBORO ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: How good bacon tasted when you broiled it yourself on a
+forked stick]
+
+
+
+
+THE CAMERONS OF HIGHBORO
+
+BY
+
+BETH B. GILCHRIST
+
+Author of "Cinderella's Granddaughter," etc.
+
+ILLUSTRATED BY PHILLIPPS WARD
+
+NEW YORK
+
+THE CENTURY CO.
+
+1919
+
+
+
+
+Copyright, 1919, by The Century Co.
+
+Published, September, 1919
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+     I ELLIOTT PLANS AND FATE DISPOSES                               1
+    II THE END OF A JOURNEY                                         23
+   III CAMERON FARM                                                 37
+    IV IN UNTRODDEN FIELDS                                          63
+     V A SLACKER UNPERCEIVED                                        91
+    VI FLIERS                                                      120
+   VII PICNICKING                                                  146
+  VIII A BEE STING                                                 171
+    IX ELLIOTT ACTS ON AN IDEA                                     197
+     X WHAT'S IN A DRESS?                                          223
+    XI MISSING                                                     244
+   XII HOME-LOVING HEARTS                                          265
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+  How good bacon tasted when you broiled it yourself
+      on a forked stick                                 _Frontispiece_
+  Laura took the new cousin up to her room                          26
+  Cutting the wiry brown stems in the fern-filled
+      glade.                                                       140
+  "I'm getting dinner all by myself"                               199
+
+
+
+
+THE CAMERONS OF HIGHBORO
+
+
+
+
+THE CAMERONS OF HIGHBORO
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+ELLIOTT PLANS AND FATE DISPOSES
+
+
+Now and then the accustomed world turns a somersault; one day it faces
+you with familiar features, the next it wears a quite unrecognizable
+countenance. The experience is, of course, nothing new, though it is
+to be doubted whether it was ever staged so dramatically and on so
+vast a scale as during the past four years. And no one to whom it
+happens is ever the same afterward.
+
+Elliott Cameron was not a refugee. She did not trudge Flemish roads
+with the pitiful salvage of her fortunes on her back, nor was she
+turned out of a cottage in Poland with only a sackful of her household
+treasures. Nevertheless, American girl though she was, she had to be
+evacuated from her house of life, the house she had been building
+through sixteen petted, autocratic years. This is the story of that
+evacuation.
+
+It was made, for all the world, like any Pole's or Serbian's or
+Belgian's; material valuables she let pass with glorious carelessness,
+as they left the silver spoons in order to salvage some sentimental
+trifle like a baby-shoe or old love-letters. Elliott took the closing
+of her home as she had taken the disposal of the big car, cheerfully
+enough, but she could not leave behind some absurd little tricks of
+thought that she had always indulged in. She was as strange to the
+road as any Picardy peasant and as bewildered, with--shall I say
+it?--considerably less pluck and spirit than some of them, when the
+landmarks she had lived by were swept away. But they, you see, had a
+dim notion of what was happening to them. Elliott had none. She didn't
+even know that she was being evacuated. She knew only that ways which
+had always worked before had mysteriously ceased working, that
+prejudices and preoccupations and habits of mind and action, which she
+had spent her life in accumulating, she must now say good-by to, and
+that the war, instead of being across the sea, a thing one's friends
+and cousins sailed away to, had unaccountably got right into America
+itself and was interfering to an unreasonable extent in affairs that
+were none of its business.
+
+Father came home one night from a week's absence and said, as he
+unfolded his napkin, "Well, chicken, I'm going to France."
+
+They were alone at dinner. Miss Reynolds, the housekeeper, was dining
+out with friends, as she sometimes did; nights that, though they both
+liked Miss Reynolds, father and daughter checked with a red mark.
+
+"To France?" A little thrill pricked the girl's spine as she
+questioned. "Is it Red Cross?"
+
+"Not this time. An investigation for the government. It may, probably
+will, take months. The government wants a thorough job done. Uncle
+Samuel thinks your ancient parent competent to hold up one end of the
+thing."
+
+"Stop!" Elliott's soft order commandeered all her dimples.
+
+"I won't have you maligning my father, you naughty man! Ancient
+parent, indeed! That's splendid, isn't it?"
+
+"I rather like it. I was hoping it would strike you the same way."
+
+"When do you go?"
+
+"As soon as I can get my affairs in shape--I could leave to-morrow, if
+I had to. Probably I shall be off in a week or ten days."
+
+"I suppose the government didn't say anything about my investigating
+something, too?"
+
+"Now you mention it, I do not recollect that the subject came up."
+
+She shook her head reprovingly, "That _was_ an omission! However, I
+think I'll go as your secretary."
+
+Mr. Cameron smiled across the table. How pretty she was, how
+daintily arch in her sweetness! "That arrangement would be entirely
+satisfactory to me, my dear, but I am not taking a secretary. I
+shall get one over there, when I need one."
+
+"But what can I go as?" pursued the girl. "I'd like to go as
+something."
+
+Heavens! she looked as though she meant it! "I'm afraid you can't go,
+Lot, this time."
+
+She lifted cajoling eyes. "But I want to. Oh, _I_ know! I can go to
+school in Paris."
+
+Her little air of having settled the matter left him smiling but
+serious. "France has mouths enough to feed without one extra
+school-girl's, chicken."
+
+"I don't eat much. Are you afraid of submarines?"
+
+"For you, yes."
+
+"I'm not. Daddies dear, _mayn't_ I go? I'd love to be near you."
+
+"Positively, my love, you may not."
+
+She drew down the corners of her mouth and went through a bewitching
+imitation of wiping tears out of her eyes. But she wasn't really
+disappointed. She had been fairly certain in advance of what the
+verdict would be. There had been a bare chance, of something
+different--that was all, and it didn't pay to let chances, even the
+barest, go by default. So she crumbled her warbread and remarked
+thoughtfully, "I suppose I can stay at home, but it won't be very
+exciting."
+
+Her father seemed to find his next words hard to say. "I had a notion
+we might close the house. It is rather expensive to keep up; not much
+point in doing so just for one, is there? In going to France I shall
+give my services."
+
+"Of course. But the house--" The delicate brows lifted. "What were you
+thinking of doing with me?"
+
+"Dumping you on the corner. What else?" The two laughed together as at
+a good joke. But there was a tightening in the man's throat. He
+wondered how soon, after next week, he would again be sitting at table
+opposite that vivacious young face.
+
+"Seriously, Lot, I met Bob in Washington. He was there on conservation
+business. When he heard what I was contemplating, he asked you up to
+Highboro. Said Jessica and he would be delighted to have you visit
+them for a year. They're generous souls. It struck me as a good plan.
+Your uncle is a fine man, and I have always admired his wife. I've
+never seen as much of her as I'd have liked. What do you say to the
+idea?"
+
+"Um-m-m." Elliott did not commit herself. "Uncle Bob and Aunt Jessica
+are very nice, but I don't know them."
+
+"House full of boys and girls. You won't be lonely."
+
+The piquant nose wrinkled mischievously. "That would never do. I like
+my own way too well."
+
+He laughed. "And you generally manage to get it by hook or by crook!"
+
+"I? You malign me. You _give_ it to me because you like me."
+
+How adorably pretty she looked!
+
+He laughed again. "You've got your old dad there, all right. Yes, yes,
+you've got him there!"
+
+"Didn't I tell you just now that you mustn't call my father old?"
+
+"So you did! So you did! Well, well, the truth will out now and then,
+you know. _Could_ you inveigle Jane into giving us more butter?--By
+the way, here's a letter from Jessica. I found it in the stack on my
+desk to-night. Better read it before you say no."
+
+"Oh, I will," Elliott received the letter without enthusiasm. "Very
+good of her, I'm sure. I'll write and thank her to-morrow; but I think
+I'll go to Aunt Nell's."
+
+"Just as you say. You know Elinor better. But I rather incline to Bob
+and Jess. There is something to be said for variety, Lot."
+
+"Yes, but a year is so long. Why, Father Cameron, a year is three
+hundred and sixty-five whole days long and I don't know how many hours
+and minutes and--and seconds. The seconds are awful! Daddles darling,
+I never could support life away from you in a perfectly strange family
+for all those interminable seconds!"
+
+"Your own cousins, chicken; and they wouldn't seem strange long. I've
+a notion they'd help make time hustle. Better read the letter. It's a
+good letter."
+
+"I will--when I don't have you to talk to. What's the matter?"
+
+"Bless me, I forgot to tell Miss Reynolds! Nell's coming to-night.
+Wired half an hour ago."
+
+"Aunt Nell? Oh, jolly!" The slender hands clapped in joyful pantomime.
+"But don't worry about Miss Reynolds. _I_ will tell Anna to make a
+room ready. Now we can settle things talking. It's so much more
+satisfactory than writing."
+
+The man laughed. "Can't say no, so easily, eh, chicken?"
+
+She joined in his laugh. "There is something in that, of course, but
+it isn't very polite of you to insinuate that any one would _wish_ to
+say no to me."
+
+"I stand corrected of an error in tact. No, I can't quite see Elinor
+turning you down."
+
+That was the joy of these two; they were such boon companions, like
+brother and sister together instead of father and daughter.
+
+But now Elliott, too, remembered something. "Oh, Father! Quincy has
+scarlet fever!"
+
+"Scarlet fever? When did he come down?"
+
+"Just to-day. They suspected it yesterday, and Stannard came over to
+Phil Tracy's. To-day the doctor made sure. So Maude and Grace are
+going right on from the wedding to that Western ranch where they were
+invited. All their outfits are in the house here, but they will get
+new ones in New York."
+
+"Where's James?"
+
+"Uncle James went to the hotel, and Aunt Margaret, of course, is
+quarantined. Quincy isn't very sick. They've postponed all their
+house-parties for two months."
+
+"H'm. Where do they think the boy caught it?"
+
+"Not an idea. He came home from school Thursday."
+
+"Well, Cedarville will be minus Camerons for a while, won't it?"
+
+"It certainly will. Both houses closed--or Uncle James's virtually so.
+Do you know what Aunt Nell is coming for?"
+
+"Not the ghost of a notion. Perhaps she is going to adopt a dozen
+young Belgians and wants me to draw up the papers."
+
+"Mercy! I hope not a whole dozen, if I am to stay at Clover Hill with
+her. Half a dozen would be enough."
+
+"Want you at Clover Hill?" said Aunt Elinor, when the first greetings
+were over and she had heard the news. "Why, you dear child, of course
+I do! Or rather I should, if I were to be there myself. But I'm going
+to France, too."
+
+"To France!"
+
+"Red Cross," with an enthusiastic nod of the perfectly dressed head.
+"Lou Emery and I are going over. That's what I stopped off to tell you
+people. Ran down to New York to see about my papers. It's all settled.
+We sail next week. Now I'm hurrying back to shut up Clover Hill. Then
+for something worth while! Do you know," the fine eyes turned from
+contemplation of a great mass of pink roses on the table, "I feel as
+though I were on the point of beginning to live at last. All my days I
+have spent dashing about madly in search of a good time. Now--well,
+now I shall go where I'm sent, live for weeks, maybe, without a bath,
+sleep in my clothes in any old place, when I sleep at all; but I'm
+crazy, simply crazy to get over there and begin."
+
+It was then that Elliott began dimly to sense a predicament. Even then
+she didn't recognize it for an _impasse_. Such things didn't happen to
+Elliott Cameron. But she did wish that Quincy had selected another
+time for isolating her Uncle James's house. Not that she particularly
+desired to spend a year, or a fraction of a year, with the James
+Camerons, but they were preferable to her Uncle Robert's family, on
+the principle that ills you know and understand make a safer venture
+than a jump in the dark. Nothing radical was wrong with the Robert
+Camerons except that they were dark horses. They lived farther away
+than the other Camerons, which wouldn't have mattered--geography
+seldom bothered a Cameron--if they hadn't chosen to let it. On second
+thoughts, perhaps that, however, was exactly what did matter. Elliott
+understood that the Robert Camerons were poor. More than once she had
+heard her father say he feared "Bob was hard up." But Bob was as proud
+as he was hard up; Elliott knew that Father had never succeeded in
+lending him any money.
+
+She let these things pass through her mind as she reviewed the
+situation. Proud and independent and poor--those were worthy
+qualities, but they did not make any family interesting. They were
+more apt, Elliott thought, to make it uninteresting. No, the Robert
+Camerons were out of the question, kindly though they might be. If she
+must spend a year outside her own home, away from her father-comrade,
+she preferred to spend it with her own sort.
+
+There is this to be said for Elliott Cameron; she had no mother, had
+had no mother since she could remember. The mother Elliott could not
+remember had been a very lovely person, and as broad-minded as she was
+charming. Elliott had her mother's charm, a personal magnetism that
+twined people around her little finger, but she was essentially
+narrow-minded. With Elliott it was a matter of upbringing, of
+coming-up rather, since within somewhat wide limits her upbringing
+had, after all, been largely in her own hands. Henry Cameron had had
+neither the heart nor the will to thwart his only child.
+
+Before she went to bed, Elliott, curled up on her window-seat, read
+Aunt Jessica's letter. It was a good letter, a delightful letter, and
+more than that. If she had been older, she might, just from reading
+it, have seen why her father wanted her to go to Highboro. As it was,
+something tugged at her heartstrings for a moment, but only for a
+moment. Then she swung her foot over the edge of the window-seat and
+disposed of the situation, as she had always disposed of situations,
+to her liking. She had no notion that the Fates this time were against
+her.
+
+The next day her cousin Stannard Cameron came over. Stannard was a
+long, lazy youth, with a notion that what he did or didn't do was a
+matter of some importance to the universe. All the Camerons were
+inclined to that supposition, all but the Robert Camerons; and we
+don't know about them yet.
+
+"So they're going to ship me up into the wilds of Vermont to Uncle
+Bob's," he ended his tale of woe. "They'll be long on the soil, and
+all that rot. Have a farm, haven't they?"
+
+"I was invited up there, too," said Elliott.
+
+"_You!_" An instant change became visible in the melancholy
+countenance. "Going?"
+
+"No, I think not."
+
+"Oh, come on! Be a sport. We'd have fun together."
+
+"I'll be a sport, but not that kind."
+
+"Guess again, Elliott. You and I could paint the place red, whatever
+kind of a shack it is they've got."
+
+"Stannard," said the girl, "you're terribly young. If you think
+I'd go anywhere with you and put up any kind of a game on our
+cousins--_cousins_, Stan--"
+
+"There are cousins and cousins."
+
+She shook her head. "No wilds in mine. When do you start?"
+
+"To-morrow, worse luck! What _are_ you going to do?"
+
+She smiled tantalizingly. "I have made plans." True, she had made
+plans. The fact that the second party to the transaction was not yet
+aware of their existence did not alter the fact that she had made
+them. Then she devoted herself to the despondent Stannard, and sent
+him away cheered almost to the point of thinking, when he left the
+house, that Vermont was not quite off the map.
+
+Not so Elizabeth Royce. Bess knew precisely what was on the map, and
+had Vermont been there, she would have noticed it. There was not much,
+Miss Royce secretly flattered herself, that escaped her. She had heard
+of Mr. Robert Cameron; but whether he resided in Kamchatka or
+Timbuctoo she could not have told you. Mr. Robert Cameron, she had
+adduced with an acumen beyond her years, was the unsuccessful member
+of a highly successful family. And now Elliott, adorable Elliott, was
+to be marooned in this uncharted district for a whole year. It was
+unthinkable!
+
+"But, Elliott darling, you'd _die_ in Vermont!"
+
+"Oh, no!" said Elliott; "I don't think I should find it pleasant, but
+I shouldn't die."
+
+"Pleasant!" sniffed Miss Royce. "I should say not."
+
+"It _is_ rather far away from everybody. Think of not seeing you for a
+year, Bess!"
+
+"I don't want to think of it. What's the matter with your Uncle
+James's house when the quarantine's lifted?"
+
+"Nothing. But it has only just been put on."
+
+"And the tournament next week. You _can't_ miss that! Oh, _Elliott_!"
+
+"I think," remarked Elliott pensively, "there ought to be a home
+opened for girls whose fathers are in France."
+
+"Why," asked Bess, gripped by a great idea, "why shouldn't you come to
+us while your uncle's house is quarantined?"
+
+Why not, indeed? Elliott thought Bess a little slow in arriving at so
+obvious and satisfactory a solution of the whole difficulty, but she
+was properly reluctant about accepting in haste. "Wouldn't that be too
+much trouble? Of course, it would be perfectly lovely for me, but what
+would your mother say?"
+
+"Mother will love to have you!" Miss Royce spoke with conviction.
+
+They spent the rest of the afternoon making plans and Elizabeth went
+home walking on air.
+
+But Mother, alas! proved a stumbling-block. "That would be very nice,"
+she said, "very nice indeed; but Elliott Cameron has plenty of
+relatives. They will make some arrangement among them. I should hardly
+feel at liberty to interfere with their plans."
+
+"But her Aunt Elinor is going to France, and you know the James
+Camerons' house is in quarantine. That leaves only the Vermont
+Camerons--"
+
+"Oh, yes. I remember, now, there was a third brother. They have their
+plans, probably."
+
+And that was absolutely all Bess could get her mother to say.
+
+"But, Mother," she almost sobbed at last, "I--I _asked_ her!"
+
+"Then I am afraid you will have to un-ask her," said Mrs. Royce. "We
+really can't get another person into the house this summer, with your
+Aunt Grace and her family coming in July."
+
+Then it was that Elliott discovered the _impasse_. Try as she would,
+she could find no way out, and she lost a good deal of sleep in the
+attempt. To have to do something that she didn't wish to do was
+intolerable. You may think this very silly; if you do, it shows that
+you have not always had your own way. Elliott had never had anything
+but her own way. That it had been in the main a sweet and likable way
+did not change the fact. And how Stannard would gloat over her! He had
+had to do the thing himself, but secretly she had looked down on him
+for it, just as she had always despised girls who lamented their
+obligation to go to places where they did not wish to go. There was
+always, she had held, a way out, if you used your brains. Altogether,
+it was a disconcerted, bewildered, and thoroughly put-out young lady
+who, a week later, found herself taking the train for Highboro. The
+world--her familiar, complacent, agreeable world--had lost its
+equilibrium.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE END OF A JOURNEY
+
+
+Hours later, from a red-plush, Pullmanless train, Elliott Cameron
+stepped down to three people--a tall, dark, surprisingly pretty
+girl a little older than herself, a chunky girl of twelve, and a
+middle-sized, freckle-faced boy. The boy took her bag and asked for
+her trunk-checks quite as well as any of her other cousins could
+have done and the tall girl kissed her and said how glad they were
+to have the chance to know her.
+
+"I am Laura," she said, "and here is Gertrude; and Henry will bring up
+your trunks to-morrow, unless you need them to-night. Mother sent you
+her love. Oh, we're so glad to have you come!"
+
+Then it is to be feared that Elliott perjured herself. Her all-day
+journey had not in the least reconciled her to the situation; if
+anything, she was feeling more bewildered and put out than when she
+started. But surprise and dismay had not routed her desire to please.
+She smiled prettily as her glance swept the welcoming faces, and
+kissed the girls and handed the boy two bits of pasteboard, and
+said--Oh, Elliott!--how delighted she was to see them at last. You
+would never have dreamed from Elliott's lips that she was not
+overjoyed at the chance to come to Highboro and become acquainted with
+cousins that she had never known.
+
+But Laura, who was wiser than she looked, noticed that the new-comer's
+eyes were not half so happy as her tongue. Poor dear, thought Laura,
+how pretty she was and how daintily patrician and charming! But her
+father was on his way to France! And though he went in civilian
+capacity and wasn't in the least likely to get hurt, when they were
+seated in the car Laura leaned over and kissed her new cousin again,
+with the recollection warm on her lips of empty, anxious days when she
+too had waited for the release of the cards announcing safe arrivals
+overseas.
+
+Elliott, who was every minute realizing more fully the inexorableness
+of the fact that she was where she was and not where she wasn't,
+kissed back without much thought. It was her nature to kiss back,
+however she might feel underneath, and the surprising suddenness of
+the whole affair had left her numb. She really hadn't much curiosity
+about the life into which she was going. What did it matter, since she
+didn't intend to stay in it? Just as soon as the quarantine was lifted
+from Uncle James's house she meant to go back to Cedarville. But she
+did notice that the little car was not new, that on their way through
+the town every one they met bowed and smiled, that Henry had amazingly
+good manners for a country boy, that Laura looked very strong, that
+Gertrude was all hands and elbows and feet and eyes, and that the car
+was continually either climbing up or sliding down hills. It slid out
+of the village down a hill, and it was climbing a hill when it met
+squarely in the road a long, low, white house, canopied by four big
+elms set at the four corners, and gave up the ascent altogether with a
+despairing honk-honk of its horn.
+
+A lady rose from the wide veranda of the white house, laid something
+gray on a table, and came smilingly down the steps. A little girl of
+eight followed her, two dogs dashed out, and a kitten. The road ran
+into the yard and stopped; but behind the house the hill kept on going
+up. Elliott understood that she had arrived at the Robert Camerons'.
+
+[Illustration: Laura took the new cousin up to her room]
+
+The lady, who was tall and dark-haired, like Laura, but with lines of
+gray threading the black, put her arms around the girl and kissed her.
+Even in her preoccupation, Elliott was dimly aware that the quality of
+this embrace was subtly different from any that she had ever received
+before, though the lady's words were not unlike Laura's. "Dear child,"
+she said, "we are so glad to know you." And the big dark eyes smiled
+into Elliott's with a look that was quite new to that young person's
+experience. She didn't know why she felt a queer thrill run up her
+spine, but the thrill was there, just for a minute. Then it was gone
+and the girl only thought that Aunt Jessica had the most fascinating
+eyes that she had ever seen; whenever she chose, it seemed that she
+could turn on a great steady light to shine through their velvety
+blackness.
+
+Laura took the new cousin up to her room. The house through which they
+passed seemed rather a barren affair, but somehow pleasant in spite of
+its dark painted floors and rag rugs and unmistakably shabby
+furniture. Flowers were everywhere, doors stood open, and breezes blew
+in at the windows, billowing the straight scrim curtains. The guest's
+room was small and slant-ceilinged. One picture, an unframed
+photograph of a big tree leaning over a brook, was tacked to the wall;
+a braided rug lay on the floor; on a small table were flowers and a
+book; over the queer old chest of drawers hung a small mirror; there
+was no pier-glass at all. Very spotless and neat, but bare--hopelessly
+bare, unless one liked that sort of thing.
+
+There was one bit of civilization, however, that these people
+appreciated--one's need of warm water. As Elliott bathed and dressed,
+her spirits lightened a little. It did rather freshen a person's
+outlook, on a hot day, to get clean. She even opened the book to
+discover its name. "Lorna Doone." Was that the kind of thing they read
+at the farm? She had always meant to read "Lorna Doone," when she had
+time enough. It looked so interminably long. But there wouldn't be
+much else to do up here, she reflected. Then she surveyed what she
+could of herself in the dim little mirror--probably Laura would wish
+to copy her style of hair-dressing--and descended, very slender and
+chic, to supper.
+
+It was a big circle which sat down at that supper-table. There was
+Uncle Robert, short and jolly and full of jokes, who wished to hear
+all about everybody and plied Elliott with questions. There was
+another new cousin, a wiry boy called Tom, and a boy older than Henry,
+who certainly wasn't a cousin, but who seemed very much one of the
+family and who was introduced as Bruce Fearing. And there was
+Stannard. Stannard had returned in high feather from Upton and
+intercourse with a classmate whom he would doubtless have termed his
+kind. Stannard was inclined for a minute or two to indulge in code
+talk with Elliott. She did not encourage him and it amused her to
+observe how speedily the conversation became general again, though in
+quite what way it was accomplished she could not detect.
+
+But if these new cousins' manners were above reproach, their
+supper-table was far from sophisticated. No maid appeared, and
+Gertrude and Tom and eight-year-old Priscilla changed the plates.
+Laura and Aunt Jessica, Elliott noticed, had entered from the kitchen.
+It was no secret that all the girls had been berrying in the forenoon.
+Henry seemed to have had a hand in making the ice-cream, judging by
+the compliments he received. So that was the way they lived, thought
+the new guest! It was, however, a surprisingly good supper. Elliott
+was astonished at herself for eating so much salad, so many berries
+and muffins, and for passing her plate twice for ice-cream.
+
+After supper every one seemed to feel it the natural thing to set to
+work and "do" the dishes, or something else equally pressing; at least
+every one for a short time grew amazingly busy. Even Elliott asked for
+an apron--it was Elliott's code when in Rome to do as the Romans
+do--though she was relieved when her uncle tucked her arm in his and
+said she must come and talk to him on the porch. As they left the
+kitchen, the boy Bruce was skilfully whirling a string mop in a pan
+full of hot suds.
+
+Under cover of animated chatter with her uncle Elliott viewed the
+prospect dolefully. Dish-washing came three times a day, didn't it?
+The thing was evidently a family rite in this household. The girl
+understood her respite could be only temporary; self-respect would see
+to that. But didn't she catch a glimpse of Stannard nonchalantly
+sauntering around a corner of the house with the air of one who hopes
+his back will not be noticed?
+
+Presently she discovered another household custom--to go up to the top
+of the hill to watch the sunset. Up between flowering borders and
+through a grassy orchard the path climbed, thence to wind through
+thickets of sweet fern and scramble around boulders over a wild,
+fragrant pasture slope. It was beautiful up there on the hilltop, with
+its few big sheltering trees, its welter of green crests on every
+side, and its line of far blue peaks behind which the sun went
+down--beautiful but depressing. Depressing because every one, except
+Stannard, seemed to enjoy it so. Elliott couldn't help seeing that
+they were having a thoroughly good time. There was something engaging
+about these cousins that Elliott had never seen among her cousins at
+home, a good-fellowship that gave one in their presence a sense of
+being closely knit together; of something solid, dependable and
+secure, for all its lightness and variety. But, oh, dear! she knew
+that she wasn't going to care for the things that they cared for, or
+enjoy doing the things that they did! And there must be at least six
+weeks of this--dish-washing and climbing hills, with good frocks on.
+Six weeks, not a day longer. But she exclaimed in pretty enthusiasm
+over Laura's disclosure of a bed of maidenhair fern, tasted
+approvingly Tom's spring water, recited perfectly, after only one
+hearing, Henry's tale of the peaks in view, and let Bruce Fearing give
+her a geography lesson from the southernmost point of the hilltop.
+
+It was only when at last she was in bed in the slant-ceilinged room,
+with her candle blown out and a big moon looking in at the window,
+that Elliott quite realized how forlorn she felt and how very, very
+far three thousand miles from Father was actually going to seem.
+
+The world up here in Vermont was so very still. There were no lights
+except the stars, and for a person accustomed to an electrically
+illuminated street only a few rods from her window, stars and a moon
+merely added to the strangeness. Soft noises came from the other
+rooms, sounds of people moving about, but not a sound from outside,
+nothing except at intervals the cry of a mournful bird. After a while
+the noises inside ceased. Elliott lay quiet, staring at the moonlit
+room, and feeling more utterly miserable than she had ever felt before
+in her life. Homesick? It must be that this was homesickness. And she
+had been wont to laugh, actually laugh, at girls who said they were
+homesick! She hadn't known that it felt like this! She hadn't known
+that anything in all the world could feel as hideous as this. She knew
+that in a minute she was going to cry--she couldn't help herself;
+actually, Elliott Cameron was going to cry.
+
+A gentle tap came at the door. "Are you asleep?" whispered a voice.
+"May I come in?"
+
+Laura entered, a tall white shape that looked even taller in the
+moonlight.
+
+"_Are_ you sleepy?" she whispered.
+
+"Not in the least," said Elliott.
+
+Laura settled softly on the foot of the bed. "I hoped you weren't.
+Let's talk. Doesn't it seem a shame to waste time sleeping on a night
+like this?"
+
+Elliott tossed her a pillow. It was comforting to have Laura there, to
+hear a voice saying something, no matter what it was talking about.
+And Laura's voice was very pleasant and what she said was pleasant,
+too.
+
+Soon another shape appeared at the door Laura had left half-open. "It
+is too fine a night to sleep, isn't it, girls?" Aunt Jessica crossed
+the strip of moonlight and dropped down beside Laura.
+
+"Are you all in here?" presently inquired a third voice. "I could hear
+you talking and, anyway, I couldn't sleep."
+
+"Come in," said Elliott.
+
+Gertrude burrowed comfortably down on the other side of her mother.
+
+Elliott, watching the three on the foot of her bed, thought they
+looked very happy. Her aunt's hair hung in two thick braids, like a
+girl's, over her shoulders, and her face, seen in the moonlight, made
+Elliott feel things that she couldn't fit words to. She didn't know
+what it was she felt, exactly, but the forlornness inside her began to
+grow less and less, until at last, when her aunt bent down and kissed
+her and a braid touched the pillow on each side of Elliott's face, it
+was quite gone.
+
+"Good night, little girl," said Aunt Jessica, "and happy dreams."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+CAMERON FARM
+
+
+Elliot opened her eyes to bright sunshine. For a minute she couldn't
+think where she was. Then the strangeness came back with a stab, not
+so poignant as on the night before but none the less actual.
+
+"Oh," said a small, eager voice, "do you think you're going to stay
+waked up now?"
+
+Elliott's eyes opened again, opened to see Priscilla's round,
+apple-cheeked face at the door.
+
+"It isn't nice to peek, I know, but I'm going to get your breakfast,
+and how could I tell when to start it unless I watched to see when you
+waked up?"
+
+"_You_ are going to get my breakfast?" Elliott rose on one elbow in
+astonishment. "All alone?"
+
+"Oh, yes!" said Priscilla. "Mother and Laura are making jelly, and
+shelling peas in between--to put up, you know--and Trudy is pitching
+hay, so they can't. Will you have one egg or two? And do you like 'em
+hard-boiled or soft; or would you rather have 'em dropped on toast?
+And how long does it take you to dress?"
+
+"One--soft-boiled, please. I'll be down in half an hour."
+
+"Half an hour will give me lots of time." The small face disappeared
+and the door closed softly.
+
+Elliott rose breathlessly and looked at her watch. Half an hour! She
+must hurry. Priscilla would expect her. Priscilla had the look of
+expecting people to do what they said they would. And hereafter, of
+course, she must get up to breakfast. She wondered how Priscilla's
+breakfast would taste. Heavens, how these people worked!
+
+As a matter of fact, Priscilla's breakfast tasted delicious. The toast
+was done to a turn; the egg was of just the right softness; a saucer
+of fresh raspberries waited beside a pot of cream, and the whole was
+served on a little table in a corner of the veranda.
+
+"Laura said you'd like it out here," Priscilla announced anxiously.
+"Do you?"
+
+"Very much indeed."
+
+"That's all right, then. I'm going to have some berries and milk right
+opposite you. I always get hungry about this time in the forenoon."
+
+"When do you have breakfast, regular breakfast, I mean?"
+
+"At six o'clock in summer, when there's so much to do."
+
+Six o'clock! Elliott turned her gasp of astonishment into a cough.
+
+"_I_ sometimes choke," said Priscilla, "when I'm awfully hungry."
+
+"Does Stannard eat breakfast at six?" Elliott felt she must get to the
+bed-rock of facts.
+
+"Oh, yes!"
+
+"What is he doing now?"
+
+Priscilla wrinkled her small brow. "Father and Bruce and Henry are
+haying, and Tom's hoeing carrots. I _think_ Stan's hoeing carrots,
+too. One day last week he hoed up two whole rows of beets; he thought
+they were weeds. Oh!" A small hand was clapped over the round red
+mouth. "I didn't mean to tell you that. Mother said I mustn't ever
+speak of it, 'cause he'd feel bad. Don't you think you could forget
+it, quick?"
+
+"I've forgotten it now."
+
+"That's all right, then. After breakfast I'm going to show you my
+chickens and my calf. Did you know, I've a whole calf all to
+myself?--a black-and-whitey one. There are some cunning pigs, too.
+Maybe you'd like to see them. And then I 'spect you'll want to go out
+to the hay-field, or maybe make jelly."
+
+"Oh, yes," said Elliott, "I can't see any of it too soon." But she was
+ashamed of her double meaning, with those round, eager eyes upon her.
+And her heart went down quite into her boots.
+
+But the chickens, she had to confess, were rather amusing. Priscilla
+had them all named and was quite sure some of them, at least, answered
+to their names and not merely to the sound of her voice. She appealed
+to Elliott for corroboration on this point and Elliott grew almost
+interested trying to decide whether or not Chanticleer knew he was
+"Chanticleer" and not "Sunflower." There were also "Fluff" and
+"Scratch" and "Lady Gay" and "Ruby Crown" and "Marshal Haig" and
+"General Petain" and many more, besides "Brevity," so named because,
+as Priscilla solicitously explained, she never seemed to grow. They
+all, with the exception of Brevity, looked as like as peas to Elliott,
+but Priscilla seemed to have no difficulty in distinguishing them.
+
+Priscilla's enthusiasm was contagious; or, to be more exact, it was so
+big and warm and generous that it covered any deficiency of enthusiasm
+in another. Elliott found herself trailing Priscilla through the barns
+and even out to see the pigs, meeting Ferdinand Foch, the very new
+colt, and Kitchener of Khartoum, who had been a new colt three years
+before, and almost holding hands with the "black-and-whitey" calf,
+which Priscilla had very nearly decided to call General Pershing. And
+didn't Elliott think that would be a nice name, with "J.J." for short?
+Elliott had barely delivered herself of a somewhat amused affirmative
+(though the amusement she knew enough to conceal), when the small
+tongue tripped into the pigs' roster. Every animal on the farm seemed
+to have a name and a personality. Priscilla detailed characteristics
+quite as though their possessors were human.
+
+It was an enlightened but somewhat surfeited cousin whom Priscilla
+blissfully escorted into the summer kitchen, a big latticed space
+filled with the pleasant odors of currant jelly. On the broad table
+stood trays of ruby-filled glasses.
+
+"We've seen all the creatures," Priscilla announced jubilantly "and
+she loves 'em. Oh, the jelly's done, isn't it? Mumsie, may we scrape
+the kettle?"
+
+Aunt Jessica laughed. "Elliott may not care to scrape kettles."
+
+Priscilla opened her eyes wide at the absurdity of the suggestion.
+"You do, don't you? You must! Everybody does. Just wait a minute till
+I get spoons."
+
+"I don't think I quite know how to do it," said Elliott.
+
+The next minute a teaspoon was thrust into her hand. "Didn't you
+_ever_?" Priscilla's voice was both aghast and pitying. "It wastes a
+lot, not scraping kettles. Good as candy, too. Here, you begin." She
+pushed a preserving-kettle forward hospitably.
+
+Elliott hesitated.
+
+"_I'll_ show you." The small hand shot in, scraped vigorously for a
+minute, and withdrew, the spoon heaped with ruddy jelly. "There!
+Mother didn't leave as much as usual, though. I 'spect it's 'cause
+sugar's so scarce. She thought she must put it all into the glasses.
+But there's always something you can scrape up."
+
+"It is delicious," said Elliott, graciously; "and what a lovely
+color!"
+
+Priscilla beamed. "You may have two scrapes to my one, because you
+have so much time to make up."
+
+"You generous little soul! I couldn't think of doing that. We will
+take our 'scrapes' together."
+
+Priscilla teetered a little on her toes. "I like you," she said. "I
+like you a whole lot. I'd hug you if my hands weren't sticky. Scraping
+kettles makes you awful sticky. You make me think of a princess, too.
+You're so bee-yeautiful to look at. Maybe that isn't polite to say.
+Mother says it isn't always nice to speak right out all you think."
+
+The dimples twinkled in Elliott's cheeks. "When you think things like
+that, it is polite enough." In the direct rays of Priscilla's shining
+admiration she began to feel like her normal, petted self once more.
+Complacently she followed the little girl into the main kitchen. It
+was a long, low, sunny room with a group of three windows at each end,
+through which the morning breeze pushed coolly. Between the windows
+opened many doors. At one side stood a range, all shining nickel and
+cleanly black. Opposite the range, at a gleaming white sink, Aunt
+Jessica was busying herself with many pans. At an immaculately scoured
+table Laura was pouring peas into glass jars. On the walls was a
+blue-and-white paper; even the woodwork was white.
+
+"I didn't know a kitchen," Elliott spoke impulsively, "could be so
+pretty."
+
+"This is our work-room," said her aunt. "We think the place where we
+work ought to be the prettiest room in the house. White paint requires
+more frequent scrubbing than colored paint; but the girls say they
+don't mind, since it keeps our spirits smiling. Would you like to help
+dry these pans? You will find towels on that line behind the stove."
+
+Elliott brought the dish-towels, and proceeded to forget her own
+surprise at the request in the interest of Aunt Jessica's talk. Mrs.
+Cameron had a lovely voice; the girl did not remember ever having
+heard a more beautiful voice, and it was used with a cultured ease
+that suddenly reminded Elliott of an almost forgotten remark once made
+in her hearing by Stannard's mother. "It is a sin and shame," Aunt
+Margaret had said, "to bury a woman like Jessica Cameron on a farm.
+What possessed her to let Robert take her there in the first place is
+beyond my comprehension. Granting that first mistake, why she has let
+him stay all these years is another enigma. Robert is all very well,
+but Jessica! I would defy any one to produce the situation _anywhere_
+that Jessica wouldn't be equal to."
+
+That had been a good deal for Aunt Margaret to say. Elliott had
+realized it at the time and wondered a little; now she understood the
+words, or thought she did. Why, even drying milk-pans took on a
+certain distinction when it was done in Aunt Jessica's presence!
+
+Then Aunt Jessica said something that really did surprise her young
+guest. She had been watching the girl closely, quite without Elliott's
+knowledge.
+
+"Perhaps you would like this for your own special part of the work,"
+she said pleasantly. "We each have our little chores, you know. I
+couldn't let every girl attempt the milk things, but you are so
+careful and thorough that I haven't the least hesitation about giving
+them to you. Now I am going to wash the separator. Watch me, and then
+you will know just what to do."
+
+The words left Elliott gasping. Wash the separator, all by herself,
+every day--or was it twice a day?--for as long as she stayed here! And
+pans--all these pans? What was a separator, anyway? She wished flatly
+to refuse, but the words stuck in her throat. There was something
+about Aunt Jessica that you couldn't say no to. Aunt Jessica so
+palpably expected you to be delighted. She was discriminating, too.
+She had recognized at once that Elliott was not an ordinary girl.
+But--but--
+
+It was all so disconcerting that self-possessed Elliott stammered. She
+stammered from pure surprise and chagrin and a confusing mixture of
+emotions, but what she stammered was in answer to Aunt Jessica's tone
+and extracted from her by the force of Aunt Jessica's personality. The
+words came out in spite of herself.
+
+"Oh--oh, thank you," she said, a bit blankly. Then she blushed with
+confusion. How awkward she had been. Oughtn't Aunt Jessica to have
+thanked her?
+
+If Aunt Jessica noticed either the confusion or the blankness, she
+gave no sign.
+
+"That will be fine!" she said heartily. "I saw by the way you handled
+those pans that I could depend on you."
+
+Insensibly Elliott's chin lifted. She regarded the pans with new
+interest. "Of course," she assented, "one has to be particular."
+
+"Very particular," said Aunt Jessica, and her dark eyes smiled on the
+girl.
+
+The words, as she spoke them, sounded like a compliment. It mightn't
+be so bad, Elliott reflected, to wash milk-pans every morning. And in
+Rome you do as the Romans do. She watched closely while Aunt Jessica
+washed the separator. She could easily do that, she was sure. It did
+not seem to require any unusual skill or strength or brain-power.
+
+"It is not hard work," said Aunt Jessica, pleasantly. "But so many
+girls aren't dependable. I couldn't count on them to make everything
+clean. Sometimes I think just plain dependableness is the most
+delightful trait in the world. It's so rare, you know."
+
+Elliott opened her eyes wide. She had been accustomed to hear charm
+and wit and vivacity spoken of in those terms, but dependableness? It
+had always seemed such a homely, commonplace thing, not worth
+mentioning. And here was Aunt Jessica talking of it as of a crown
+jewel! Right down in her heart at that minute Elliott vowed that the
+separator should always be clean.
+
+The separator, however, must not commit her indiscriminately, she saw
+that clearly. Perhaps in fact, it would save her. Hadn't Aunt Jessica
+said each had her own tasks? Ergo, you let others alone. But she had
+an uncomfortable feeling that this reasoning might prove false in
+practice; in this household a good many tasks seemed to be pooled. How
+about them?
+
+And then Laura looked up from her jars and said the oddest thing yet
+in all this morning of odd sayings: "Oh, Mother, mayn't we take our
+dinner out? It is such a perfectly beautiful day!" As though a
+beautiful day had anything to do with where you ate your dinner!
+
+But Aunt Jessica, without the least surprise in her voice, responded
+promptly: "Why, yes! We have three hours free now, and it seems a
+crime to stay in the house."
+
+What in the world did they mean?
+
+Priscilla seemed to have no difficulty in understanding. She jumped up
+and down and cried: "Oh, goody! goody! We're going to take our dinner
+out! We're going to take our dinner out! Isn't it _jolly_?"
+
+She was standing in front of Elliott as she spoke, and the girl felt
+that some reply was expected of her. "Why, can we? Where do we go?"
+she asked, exactly as though she expected to see a hotel spring up out
+of the ground before her eyes.
+
+"Lots of days we do," said Priscilla. "We'll find a nice place. Oh,
+I'm glad it takes peas three whole hours to can themselves. I think
+they're kind of slow, though, don't you?"
+
+Laura noticed the bewilderment on Elliott's face. "Priscilla means
+that we are going to eat our dinner out-of-doors while the peas cook
+in the hot-water bath," she explained. "Don't you want to pack up the
+cookies? You will find them in that stone crock on the first shelf in
+the pantry, right behind the door. There's a pasteboard box in there,
+too, that will do to put them in."
+
+"How many shall I put up?" questioned Elliott.
+
+"Oh, as many as you think we'll eat. And I warn you we have good
+appetites."
+
+Those were the vaguest directions, Elliott thought, that she had ever
+heard; but she found the box and the stone pot of cookies and stood a
+minute, counting the people who were to eat them. Four right here in
+the kitchen and five--no, six--out-of-doors. Would two dozen cookies
+be enough for ten people? She put her head into the kitchen to ask,
+but there was no one in sight, so she had to decide the point by
+herself. After nibbling a crumb she thought not, and added another
+dozen. And then there was still so much room left that she just filled
+up the box, regardless. Afterward she was very glad of it. She
+wouldn't have supposed it possible for ten people to eat as many
+cookies as those ten people ate after all the other things they had
+eaten.
+
+By the time she had finished her calculations with the cookies, Aunt
+Jessica and Laura and Priscilla were ready. When Elliott emerged from
+the pantry, the little car was at the kitchen door, with a hamper and
+two pails of water in it, and on the back seat a long, queer-looking
+box that Laura told Elliott was a fireless cooker.
+
+"Home-made," said Laura, "you'd know that to look at it, but it works
+just as well. It's the grandest thing, especially when we want to eat
+out-of-doors. Saves lots of trouble."
+
+Elliott gasped. "You mean you carry it along to cook the dinner in?"
+
+"Why, the dinner's cooking in it now! Hop on, everybody. Mother, you
+take the wheel. Elliott and I will ride on the steps."
+
+Away they sped, bumpity-bump, to the hay-field, picking up the
+carrot-hoers as they went. It is astonishing how many people can cling
+to one little car, when those people are neither very wide nor, some
+of them, very tall. From the hay-field they nosed their way into a
+little dell, all ferns and cool white birches, and far above, a canopy
+of leaf-traceried blue sky. In the next few minutes it became very
+plain to the new cousin that the Camerons were used to doing this kind
+of thing. Every one seemed to know exactly what to do. The pails of
+water were swung to one side; the fireless cooker took up its position
+on a flat gray rock. The hamper yielded loaves of bread--light and
+dark, that one cut for oneself on a smooth white board--and a basket
+stocked with plates and cups and knives and forks and spoons. Potted
+meat and potatoes and two kinds of vegetables, as they were wanted,
+came from the fireless cooker, all deliciously tender and piping hot.
+It was like a cafeteria in the open, thought Elliott, except that one
+had no tray.
+
+And every one laughed and joked and had a good time. Even Elliott had
+a fairly good time, though she thought it was thoroughly queer. You
+see, it had never occurred to her that people could pick up their
+dinner and run out-of-doors into any lovely spot that they came to, to
+eat it. She wasn't at all sure she cared for that way of doing things.
+But she liked the beauty of the little dell, the ferny smell of it,
+and the sunshine and cheerfulness. The occasional darning-needles, and
+small green worms, and black or other colored bugs, she enjoyed less.
+She hadn't been accustomed to associate such things with her dinner.
+But nobody else seemed to mind; perhaps the others were used to taking
+bugs and worms with their meals. If one appeared, they threw him away
+and went on eating as though nothing had happened.
+
+And of course it was rather clever of them, the girl reflected, to
+take a picnic when they could get it. If they hadn't done so, she
+didn't quite see, judging by the portion of a day she had so far
+observed, how they could have got any picnics at all. The method
+utilized scraps of time, left-overs and between-times, that were good
+for little else. It was a rather arresting discovery, to find out that
+people could divert themselves without giving up their whole time to
+it. But, after all, it wasn't a method for her. She was positive on
+that point. It seemed the least little bit common, too--such
+whole-hearted absorption as the Camerons showed in pursuits that were
+just plain work.
+
+"Stan," she demanded, late that afternoon, "is there any tennis
+here?"
+
+"Not so you'd notice it. What are you thinking of, in war-time,
+Elliott? Uncle Samuel expects every farmer to do his duty. All the men
+and older boys around here have either volunteered or been drafted. So
+we're all farmers, especially the girls. _Quod erat demonstrandum_.
+Savvy?"
+
+"Any luncheons?"
+
+"Meals, Lot, plain meals."
+
+"Parties?"
+
+Stannard threw up his hands. "Never heard of 'em!"
+
+"Canoeing?"
+
+"No water big enough."
+
+"I suppose nobody here thinks of motoring for pleasure."
+
+"Never. Too busy."
+
+"Or gets an invitation for a spin?"
+
+"You're behind the times."
+
+"So I see."
+
+"Harry told me that this summer is extra strenuous," Stannard
+explained; "but they've always rather gone in for the useful, I take
+it. Had to, most likely. They'd be all right, too, if they didn't live
+so. They're a good sort, an awfully good sort. But, ginger, how a
+fellow'd have to hump to keep up with 'em! I don't try. I do a little,
+and then sit back and call it done."
+
+If Elliott hadn't been so miserable, she would have laughed. Stannard
+had hit himself off very well, she thought. He had his good points,
+too. Not once had he reminded her that she hadn't intended to spend
+her summer on a farm. But she was too unhappy to tease him as she
+might have done at another time. She was still bewildered and inclined
+to resent the trick life had played her. The prospect didn't look any
+better on close inspection than it had at first; rather worse, if
+anything. Imagine her, Elliott Cameron pitching hay! Not that any one
+had asked her to. But how could a person live for six weeks with these
+people and not do what they did? Such was Elliott's code. Delightful
+people, too. But she didn't wish to pitch hay and she loathed washing
+dishes. There was something so messy about dish-washing, ordinary
+dish-washing; milk-pans were different.
+
+Then suddenly Elliott Cameron did a strange thing. By this time she
+had shaken off Stannard and had betaken herself and her disgust to the
+edge of the woods. She was so very miserable that she didn't know
+herself and she knew herself less than ever in this next act. Alone in
+the woods, as she thought, with only moss underfoot and high green
+boughs overhead, Elliott lifted her foot and deliberately and with
+vehemence stamped it. "I don't like things!" she whispered, a little
+shocked at her own words. "I don't _like_ things!"
+
+Then she looked up and met the amused eyes of Bruce Fearing.
+
+For a minute the hot color flooded the girl's face. But she seized the
+bull by the horns. "I am cross," she said, "frightfully cross!" And
+she looked so engagingly pretty as she said it that Bruce thought he
+had never seen so attractive a girl.
+
+"Anything in particular gone wrong with the universe?"
+
+"Everything, with my part of it." What possessed her, she wondered
+afterward, to say what she said next? "I never wanted to come here."
+
+"That so? We've been thinking it rather nice."
+
+In spite of herself, she was mollified. "It isn't quite that, either,"
+she explained. "I've only just discovered the real trouble, myself.
+What makes me so mad isn't altogether the fact that I didn't want to
+come up here. It's that I hadn't any choice. I _had_ to come."
+
+The boy's eyes twinkled. "So that's what's bothering you, is it? Cheer
+up! You had the choice of _how_ you'd come, didn't you?"
+
+"How?"
+
+"Yes. Sometimes I think that's all the choice they give us in this
+world. It's all I've had, anyway--how I'd do a thing."
+
+"You mean, gracefully or--"
+
+"I mean--"
+
+"Hello!" said Stannard's voice. "What are you two chinning about
+before the cows come home?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+IN UNTRODDEN FIELDS
+
+
+"You don't want to have much to do with that fellow," said Stannard,
+when Bruce Fearing had gone on about whatever business he had in
+hand.
+
+"Why not?" Elliott's tone was short. She had wanted to hear what Bruce
+was going to say.
+
+"Oh, he is all right, enough, I guess, but nobody knows where he came
+from. He and that Pete brother of his are no relations of ours, or of
+Aunt Jessica's either."
+
+"How does he happen to be living here, then?"
+
+"Search me. Some kind of a pick-up, I gathered. Nobody talks much
+about it. They take him as a matter of course. All right enough for
+them, if they want to, but they really ought to warn strangers. A
+fellow would think he was--er--all right, you know."
+
+Stannard's words made Elliott very uncomfortable. She thought the
+reason they disquieted her was that she had rather liked Bruce
+Fearing, and now to have him turn out a person whom she couldn't be as
+friendly with as she wished was disconcerting. It was only another
+point in her indictment of life on the Cameron farm; one couldn't tell
+whom one was knowing. But she determined to sound Laura, which would
+be easy enough, and Stannard's charge might prove unfounded.
+
+But sounding Laura was not easy, chiefly for the reason Stannard had
+shrewdly deduced, that the Robert Camerons took Peter and Bruce
+Fearing in quite as matter-of-fact a way as they took themselves.
+Laura even failed to discover that she was being sounded.
+
+"Who is this 'Pete' you're always talking about?" Elliott asked.
+
+"Bruce's older brother--I almost said ours." The two girls were
+skimming currants, Laura with the swift skill of accustomed fingers,
+Elliott more slowly. "He is perfectly fine. I wish you could know
+him."
+
+"I gathered he was Bruce's brother."
+
+"He's not a bit like Bruce. Pete is short and dark and as quick as a
+flash. You'd know he would make a splendid aviator. There was a letter
+in the 'Upton News' last night from an Upton doctor who is over there,
+attached now to our boys' camp; did you see it? He says Bob and Pete
+are 'the acknowledged aces' of their squadron. That shows we must have
+missed some of their letters. The last one from Bob was written just
+after he had finished his training."
+
+"This--Pete went from here?"
+
+"He and Bob were in Tech together, juniors. They enlisted in Boston,
+and they've kept pretty close tabs on each other ever since. They had
+their training over here in the same camps. In France, Pete got into
+spirals first, 'by a fluke,' as he put it; Bob was unlucky with his
+landings. But, some way or other, Bob seems to have beaten him to the
+actual fighting. Now they're in it together." And Laura smiled and
+then sighed, and the nimble fingers stopped work for a minute, only to
+speed faster than ever.
+
+"I haven't read you any of their letters, have I? Or Sid's either?
+(Sidney is my twin, you know. He is at Devens.) But I will. If
+anything, Pete's are funnier than Bob's. Both the boys have an eye to
+the jolly side of things. Sometimes you wouldn't think there was
+anything to flying but a huge lark, by the way they write. But there
+was one letter of Pete's (it was to Mother), written from their first
+training-camp in France after one of the boys' best friends had been
+killed. Pete was evidently feeling sober, but oh, so different from
+the way any one would have felt about such a thing before the war
+began! There was plenty of fun in the letter, too, but toward the end,
+Pete told about this Jim Stone's death, and he said: 'It has made us
+all pretty serious, but nobody's blue. Jim was a splendid fellow, and
+a chap can't think he has stopped as quick as all that. Mother Jess,
+do you remember my talking to you one Sunday after church, freshman
+vacation, about the things I didn't believe in? Why didn't you tell me
+I was a fool? You knew it then, and I know it now.' That's Pete all
+over. It made Mother and me very happy."
+
+Elliott felt rather ashamed to continue her probing. "Have they always
+lived with you," she asked, "the Fearings?"
+
+"Oh, yes, ever since I can remember. Isn't Bruce splendid? I don't
+know how we could have got on at all this summer without Bruce."
+
+Then Elliott gave up. If a mystery existed, either Laura didn't know
+of it, or she had forgotten it, or else she considered it too
+negligible to mention.
+
+The girl found that for some reason she did not care to ask
+Stannard the source of his information. Would Bruce himself prove
+communicative? There could be no harm in finding out. Besides, it
+would tease Stannard to see her talking with "that fellow," and
+Elliott rather enjoyed teasing Stannard. And didn't she owe him
+something for a dictatorial interruption?
+
+The thing would require manoeuvering. You couldn't talk to Bruce
+Fearing, or to any one else up here, whenever you felt like it; he was
+far too busy. But on the hill at sunset Elliott found her chance.
+
+"I think Aunt Jessica," she remarked, "is the most wonderful woman
+I've ever seen."
+
+A glow lit up Bruce's quiet gray eyes. "Mother Jess," he said, "is a
+miracle."
+
+"She is so terrifically busy, and yet she never seems to hurry; and
+she always has time to talk to you and she never acts tired."
+
+"She is, though."
+
+"I suppose she must be, sometimes. I like that name for her, 'Mother
+Jess.' Your--aunt, is she?"
+
+"Oh, no," said Bruce, simply. "I've no Cameron or Fordyce blood in me,
+or any other pedigreed variety. My corpuscles are unregistered. She
+and Father Bob took Pete and me in when I was a baby and Pete was a
+mere toddler. I was born in the hotel down in the town there,--Am I
+boring you?"
+
+"No, indeed!" Elliott had the grace to blush at the ease with which
+she was carrying on her investigation.
+
+He wondered why she flushed, but went on quietly. "Our own mother died
+there in the hotel when I was a week old and we didn't seem to have
+any kin. At least, they never showed up. Mother was evidently a widow;
+Mother Jess got that from her belongings. She stopped overnight at
+Highboro, and I was born there. She hadn't told any one in the hotel
+where she was going. Registered from Boston, but nobody could be found
+in Boston who knew of her. The authorities were going to send Pete and
+me to some kind of a capitalized Home, when Mother Jess stepped in.
+She hadn't enough boys, so she said. Bob and Laura and Sid were on
+deck. Henry and Tom came along later. Fordyce was the one that died;
+he'd just slipped out. Mother Jess was feeling lonely, I guess.
+Anyway, she took us two; said she thought we'd be better off on the
+farm than in a Home and she needed us--bless her! Do you wonder Pete
+and I swear by the Camerons?"
+
+"No," said Elliott. "Indeed I don't." She had what she had been
+angling for, in good measure, but she rather wished she hadn't got it,
+after all. "Haven't you had any clue in all these years as to who your
+people were?"
+
+"Not the slightest. I'm willing to let things rest as they are."
+
+"Yes, of course," thought Elliott, "but--" She let it go at "but."
+Oughtn't somebody, as Stannard said, to have warned her? These boys'
+people might have been very common persons, not at all like Camerons.
+The fact that no relatives appeared proved that, didn't it? Every one
+who was any one at all had a family. Bruce did not look common: his
+gray eyes and his broad forehead and his keen, thin face were almost
+distinguished, and his manners were above criticism. But one never
+could tell. And hadn't he been brought up by Camerons? The very
+openness with which he had told his story had something fine about it.
+He, like Laura, seemed to see nothing in it to conceal.
+
+Well, was there? Elliott could quite clearly imagine what Aunt
+Margaret, Stannard's mother, would say to that question. She had never
+especially cared for Aunt Margaret. As Elliott looked at Bruce
+Fearing, one of the pillars of her familiar world began to totter.
+Actually, she could think of no particularly good reason why, when she
+had heard his story, she should proceed to shun him. His history
+simply didn't seem to matter, except to make her sorry for him; and
+yet she couldn't be really sorry for a boy who had been brought up by
+Aunt Jessica.
+
+Perhaps the Cameron Farm atmosphere was already beginning to work.
+
+"I think you and your brother had luck," she said.
+
+"I know we did," answered Bruce.
+
+Elliott turned the conversation. "I wish you could tell me what you
+were going to say, when we were interrupted yesterday, about a
+person's having no choice except how he will do things--_you_ having
+had only that kind of choice."
+
+"I remember," said Bruce. "Well, for one thing, I suppose I could get
+grouchy, if I chose, over not knowing who my people were."
+
+"They may have been very splendid," said Elliott.
+
+Bruce smiled. "It's not likely."
+
+"In that case," she countered, "you have the satisfaction of _not_
+knowing who they were."
+
+"Exactly. But that's rather a crawl, isn't it? Of course, a fellow
+would like to know."
+
+The boy bent forward, and, with painstaking care, selected a blade
+from a tuft of grass growing between his feet. He nibbled a minute
+before he spoke again.
+
+"See here, I'm going to tell you something I haven't told a soul. I'm
+crazy to go to the war. Sometimes it seems as though I couldn't stay
+home. When Pete's letters come I have to go away somewhere quick and
+chop wood! Anything to get busy for a while."
+
+"Aren't you too young? Would they take you?"
+
+"Take me? You bet they'd take me! I'm eighteen. Don't I look twenty?"
+
+The girl's eye ran critically over the strong young body, with its
+long, supple, sinewy lines. "Yes," she nodded. "I think you do."
+
+"They'd take me in a minute, in aviation or anything else."
+
+"Then why don't you?"
+
+"Who'd help Father Bob through the farm stunts? Young Bob's gone, and
+Pete and Sidney. They were always here for the summer work. Henry's a
+fine lad, but a boy still. Tom's nothing but a boy, though he does
+his bit. As for the Women's Land Army, it's got up into these parts,
+but not in force. Father Bob can't hire help: it's not to be had.
+That's why Mother Jess and the girls are going in so for farm work.
+They never did it before this year, except in sport. We have more land
+under cultivation this summer than ever before, and fewer hands to
+harvest it with. But Mother and the girls sha'n't have to work
+harder than they're doing now, if I can help it. Could I go off and
+leave them, after all they've done for me? But that's not it,
+either--gratitude. They're mine, Father Bob and Mother Jess are, and
+the rest; they're my folks. You're not exactly grateful to your own
+folks, you know. They belong to you. And you don't leave what belongs
+to you in the lurch."
+
+"No," said Elliott. With awakened eyes she was watching Bruce. No boy
+had ever talked of such things to her before. "So you're not going?"
+
+"Not of my own will. Of course, if the war lasts and I'm drafted, or
+the help problem lightens up, it will be different. Pete's gone. It
+was Pete's right to go. He's the elder."
+
+"But you _are_ choosing," Elliott cried earnestly. "Don't you see?
+You're choosing to stay at home and--" words came swiftly into her
+memory--"'fight it out on these lines all summer.'"
+
+Bruce's smile showed that he recognized her quotation, but he shook
+his head. "Choosing? I haven't any choice--except being decent about
+it. Don't _you_ see I can't go? I can only try to keep from thinking
+about not going."
+
+"You being you," said the girl, and she spoke as simply and soberly as
+Bruce himself, though her own warmth surprised her, "I see you can't
+go. But was that all you meant"--her voice grew ludicrously
+disappointed--"by a person's having a choice only of how he will do a
+thing? There's nothing to that but making the best of things!"
+
+Bruce Fearing threw back his head and laughed heartily.
+
+"You're the funniest girl I've ever seen."
+
+"Then you can't have seen many. But _is_ there?"
+
+"Perhaps not. Stupid, isn't it?"
+
+"Yes," she nodded, "I'm afraid it is. And frightfully old. I was
+hoping you were going to tell me something new and exciting."
+
+The boy chuckled again. "Nothing so good as that. Besides, I've a
+hunch the exciting things aren't very new, after all."
+
+Elliott went to sleep that night, if not any happier, at least more
+interested. She had looked deep into the heart of a boy, different, it
+appeared, from any boy that she had ever known; and something loyal
+and sturdy and tender she had seen there had stirred her. It was odd
+how well acquainted she felt with him; odd, too, how curious she was
+to know him better, even though he hadn't the least idea who his
+grandfather had been. "Bother his grandfather!" Elliott chuckled to
+realize how such a sentiment would horrify Aunt Margaret. Grandfathers
+were very important to Aunt Margaret and Aunt Margaret's children.
+Grandfathers had always seemed fairly important to Elliott herself
+until now. Was it their relative unimportance in the Robert Camerons'
+estimation, or a pair of steady gray eyes, that had altered her
+valuation? The girl didn't know and she was keen enough to know that
+she didn't; keen enough, too, to perceive that the change in her
+estimation of grandfathers applied to a single case only and might be
+merely temporary.
+
+However that might be, she was not ready yet to do anything so
+inherently distasteful as make the best of what she didn't like,
+especially when nobody but herself and two boys would know it. When
+one makes the best of things, one likes to do it to crowded galleries,
+that perceive what is going on and applaud. The Robert Camerons,
+Elliott was quite sure, wouldn't applaud. They would take it as a
+matter of course, just as they took her as a matter of course. They
+were quite charming about it, as delightful hosts as one could
+wish--if only they lived differently!--but Elliott wasn't used to
+being taken for granted. She might have been these new cousins' own
+sort, for any difference she could detect in their actions. They
+didn't seem to begin to understand her importance. Perhaps she wasn't
+so important, after all. The doubt had never before entered her mind.
+
+The fact was, of course, that among these busy, efficient people she
+was feeling quite useless; and she didn't like to appear incompetent
+when she knew herself to be, in her own line, a thoroughly able
+person. But it irked her to think that she had been forced into a
+position where in self-defense she must either acquire a kind of
+efficiency she didn't want or do without. At the same time it troubled
+her lest this reluctance become apparent. For they were all loves and
+she wouldn't hurt their feelings for worlds. And she did wish them to
+admire her. But she had a feeling that they didn't altogether, not
+even Priscilla and Bruce.
+
+Nevertheless, the next day when Laura asked whether she would take her
+book out to the hay-field or stay where she was on the porch, Elliott
+looked up from "Lorna Doone" and said, with the prettiest little
+coaxing air, "If I go, will you let me pitch hay?" And Laura answered
+as lightly, "Certainly." "I don't believe you," said Elliott. "You may
+ride on the hay-load," smiled Laura. "That won't do at all," Elliott
+shook her head. "If I can't pitch hay, I'll stay here." Laura laughed
+and said: "You certainly will be more comfortable here. I can't quite
+see you pitching hay." And Elliott retorted: "You don't know what I
+could do, if I tried. But since you won't let me try--"
+
+It was all smiling and gay, but it was a crawl, and Elliott knew it
+and knew that Laura knew it, and she felt ashamed. Wasn't Stannard's
+frank shirking better than her camouflaged variety? But hadn't she
+picked berries all the morning in a stuffy sunbonnet under a broiling
+sun, until she felt as red as a berry and much less fresh and sweet?
+
+"It's a shame," said Laura, "that this is just our busy season; but
+you know you have to make hay while the sun shines. Father thinks we
+can finish the lower meadows to-day. Then to-morrow we begin cutting
+on the hill. It's really fun to ride the hay-rake. I mostly drive the
+rake, though now and then I pitch for variety."
+
+She looked so strong and brown and merry, as she talked, that Elliott,
+comfortably established with "Lorna Doone," felt almost like flinging
+her book into the next chair, slipping her arm through Laura's, and
+crying, "Lead on!" But she remembered just in time that, as she hadn't
+wished to come to the Cameron Farm, it would ill become her to have a
+good time there. Which may seem like a childish way of looking at the
+thing, but isn't really confined to children at all.
+
+So the hay-makers tramped away down the road, their laughter floating
+cheerfully back over their shoulders; and Elliott sat on the big shady
+veranda and read her book.
+
+She might have enjoyed it less had she heard Henry's frank summary at
+the turn of the lane, when his father inquired the whereabouts of
+Stannard.
+
+"Beau Brummell hiked over to Upton half an hour ago. I offered him the
+other Henry, but he doesn't seem to care to drive anything short of a
+Pierce-Arrow. Twins, aren't they?" and Henry nodded in the direction
+of the veranda.
+
+"Sh-h!" reproved Laura. "They're our guests."
+
+"Guests is just it. Yes, they're _guests_, all right."
+
+"Mother says they don't know how to work," Priscilla observed.
+
+"That's another true word, too."
+
+Mother turned gaily in the road ahead. "Who is talking about me?" she
+called.
+
+Priscilla frisked on to join her, and Henry fell back to a confidential
+exchange with Laura. "Beau wouldn't be so bad if he could forget for a
+minute that he owned the earth and had a mortgage on the solar system.
+But when he tries to snub Bruce--gee, that gets me!"
+
+"Aren't you twanging the G string rather often lately, Hal?--Stannard
+can't snub Bruce. Bruce isn't the kind of fellow to be snubbed."
+
+"Just the same, it makes me sick to think anybody's a cousin to me
+that would try it."
+
+Laura switched back to the main subject. "We didn't ask them up here
+as extra farm hands, you know."
+
+"Bull's-eye," said Henry, and grinned.
+
+What she did not know failed to trouble Elliott. She read on in lonely
+peace through the afternoon. At a most exciting point the telephone
+rang. Four, that was the Cameron call. Elliott went into the house and
+took down the receiver.
+
+"Mr. Robert Cameron's," she said pleasantly.
+
+"S-say!" stuttered a high, sharp voice, "my little b-b-boys have let
+your c-c-cows out o' the p-p-pasture. I'll g-give 'em a t-t-trouncin',
+but 't won't git your c-c-cows back. They let 'em out the G-G-Garrett
+Road, and your medder gate's open. Jim B-B-Blake saw it this mornin'!
+Why the man didn't shut it, I d-d-dunno. You'll have to hurry to save
+your medder."
+
+"But," gasped Elliott, "I don't understand! You say the cows--"
+
+"Are comin' down G-Garrett Road," snapped the stuttering voice, "the
+whole kit an' b-b-bilin' of 'em. They'll be inter your upper m-medder
+in five m-m-minutes."
+
+Over the wire came the click of a receiver snapping back on its hook.
+Elliott hung up and started toward the door. The cows had been let
+out. Just why this incident was so disastrous she did not quite
+comprehend, but she must go and tell her uncle. Before her feet
+touched the veranda, however, she stopped. Five minutes? Why, there
+wouldn't be time to go to the lower meadow, to say nothing of any
+one's doing anything about the situation.
+
+And then, with breath-taking suddenness, the thing burst on her. She
+was alone in the house; even Aunt Jessica and Priscilla had gone to
+the hay-field. The situation, whatever it was, was up to her.
+
+For a minute the girl leaned weakly against the wall. Cows--there were
+thirty in the herd--and she loathed cows! She was afraid of cows. She
+knew nothing about cows. She was never in the slightest degree sure of
+what the creatures might take it into their heads to do. For a minute
+she stood irresolute. Then something stirred in the girl, something
+self-reliant and strong. Never in her life had Elliott Cameron had to
+do alone anything that she didn't already know how to do. Now for the
+first time she faced an emergency on none but her own resources, an
+emergency that was quite out of her line.
+
+Her brain worked swiftly as her feet moved to the door. In reality,
+she had wavered only a second. When Tom went for the cows, didn't he
+take old Prince? There was just a chance that Prince wasn't in the
+hay-field. She ran down the steps calling, "Prince! Prince!" The old
+dog rose deliberately from his place on the shady side of the barn and
+trotted toward her, wagging his tail. "Come, Prince!" cried Elliott,
+and ran out of the yard.
+
+Luckily, berrying had that very morning taken her by a short cut to
+the vicinity of the upper meadow. She knew the way. But what was
+likely to happen? Town-bred girl that she was, she had no idea. A
+recollection of the smooth, upstanding expanse of the upper meadow
+gave her a clue. If the cows got into that even erectness-- She began
+to run, Prince bounding beside her, his brown tail a waving plume.
+
+She could see the meadow now, a smooth green sea ruffled by nothing
+heavier than the light feet of the summer breeze. She could see the
+great gate invitingly open to the road and oh!--her heart stopped
+beating, then pounded on at a suffocating pace--she could see the
+cows! There they came, down the hill, quite filling the narrow roadway
+with their horrid bulk, making it look like a moving river of broad
+backs and tossing heads. What could she do, the girl wondered; what
+could she do against so many? She tried to run faster. Somehow she
+must reach the gate first. There was nothing even then, so far as she
+knew, to prevent their trampling her down and rushing over her into
+the waving greenness, unless she could slam the gate in their faces.
+You can see that she really did not know much about cows.
+
+But Prince knew them. Prince understood now why his master's guest had
+summoned him to this hot run in the sunshine. The prospect did not
+daunt Prince. He ran barking to the meadow side of the road. The
+foremost cow which, grazing the dusty grass, had strayed toward the
+gate, turned back into the ruts again. Elliott pulled the gate shut,
+in her haste leaving herself outside. There, too spent to climb over,
+she flattened her slender form against the gray boards, while, driven
+by Prince, the whole herd, horns tossing, tails switching, flanks
+heaving, thudded its way past.
+
+And there, three minutes later, Bruce, dashing over the hill in
+response to a message relayed by telephone and boy to the lower
+meadow, found her.
+
+"The cows have gone down," Elliott told him. "Prince has them. He will
+take them home, won't he?"
+
+"Prince? Good enough! He'll get the cows home all right. But what are
+you doing in this mix-up?"
+
+"A woman telephoned the house," said Elliott. "I was afraid I couldn't
+reach any of you in time, so I came over myself."
+
+"You like cows?" The question shot at her like a bullet.
+
+The piquant nose wrinkled entrancingly. "Scared to death of 'em."
+
+"I guessed as much." The boy nodded. "Gee whiz, but you've got good
+stuff in you!"
+
+And though her shoes were dusty and her hair tousled, and though her
+knees hadn't stopped shaking even yet, Elliott Cameron felt a sudden
+sense of satisfaction and pride. She turned and looked over the fence
+at the meadow. In its unmarred beauty it seemed to belong to her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+A SLACKER UNPERCEIVED
+
+
+"I think," remarked Elliott, the next morning, "that I will walk up
+and watch the haying for a while."
+
+She had finished washing the separator and the milk-pans. It had
+taken a full hour the first morning; growing expertness had already
+reduced the hour to three-quarters, and she had hopes of further
+reductions. She still held firmly to the opinion that the process
+was uninteresting, but an innate sense of fairness told her that the
+milk-pans were no more than her share. Of course, she couldn't spend
+six weeks in a household whose component members were as busy as
+were this household's members, and do nothing at all. That was the
+disadvantage in coming to the place. She was bound to dissemble her
+feelings and wash milk-pans. But if she had to wash them, she might
+as well do it well. There was no question about that. If the
+actual process still bored the girl, the results did not. Elliott
+was proud of her pans, with a pride in which there was no atom of
+indifference. She scoured them until they shone, not because, as she
+told herself, she liked to scour, but because she liked to see the
+pans shine.
+
+Aunt Jessica liked to see them shine, too. She paused on her way
+through the kitchen. "What beautiful pans! I can see my face in every
+one of them."
+
+A glow of elation struck through Elliott. Aunt Jessica was loving and
+sweet, but she did not lavish commendation in quarters where it was
+not due. Elliott knew her pans were beautiful, but Aunt Jessica's
+praise made them doubly so.
+
+It was then, as she hung up her towels, that she made the remark about
+walking up to the hill meadow. She had a notion she would like to see
+the knives put into that unbroken expanse of tall grass for which she
+continued to feel a curious responsibility. A mere appearance at the
+field could not commit her to anything.
+
+"If you are going up," said Aunt Jessica, "perhaps you will take some
+of these cookies I have just baked. Gertrude has made lemonade."
+
+That was one of the delightful things about Aunt Jessica, Elliott
+thought: she never probed beneath the surface of one's words, she
+never even looked curiosity, and she gave one immediately a reason for
+doing what one wished to do. Lemonade and cookies made an appearance
+in the hay-field the most natural thing in the world.
+
+The upper meadow proved a surprise. Not its business--Elliott had
+expected business, but its odd mingling of jollity with activity. They
+all seemed to be having such a good time about their work. And yet the
+jollity did not in the least interfere with the business, which
+appeared to be going forward in a systematic and efficient way that
+even an untrained girl could not fail to notice. Elliott's advent
+would have occasioned little disturbance, she suspected, had it not
+been for the cookies. She was used by now to having no fuss made over
+her. Laura waved a hand from her seat behind the horses; the boys
+swung their hats; Priscilla darted over to display a ground-sparrow's
+nest that the scythes had disclosed.
+
+It was Priscilla who discovered the cookies and sent a squeal of
+delight across the meadow. But even then the workers did not pause.
+Priscilla had to dance out across the mown grass and squeal again and
+wave both hands, a cooky in one, a cup in the other, and add a shrill
+little yelp, "Come on! Come on, peoples! You don't know what we've got
+here," before they straggled over to what Henry called "the
+refreshment booth."
+
+Then they were ready enough to notice Elliott. Uncle Robert and the
+boys cracked jokes, the girls chattered and laughed, and every one
+called on her to applaud the amount of work they had already
+accomplished, exactly as though she understood about such things.
+
+And Elliott did applaud, reinforcing her words with a whole battery
+of dimples, all the while privately resolving that no contagion of
+enthusiasm should inoculate her with the haymaking germ. There were
+factors that made it all a bit hard to withstand; the sky was so blue,
+the breeze was so jolly, the mown grass smelled so delicious, and
+the mountain air had such zest in it. But, on the other hand, the sun
+was hot and downright and freckling; Priscilla's tip-tilted little
+nose was already liberally besprinkled. If Laura hadn't such a
+wonderful skin, she would have been a sight long ago, despite the
+wide brim of her big straw hat. A mere farm hat, and Laura looked
+like a mere husky farm girl, as she guided her horses skilfully around
+the field. How strong her arms must be! But how could a girl with
+Laura's intelligence and high spirit and charm enjoy putting all
+this time into haying? With Priscilla, of course, matters stood
+differently. Children never discriminate.
+
+"No, I sha'n't do that kind of thing," said Elliott, firmly. But she
+would investigate the haymaking game, investigate it coolly and
+dispassionately, to find out exactly what it amounted to--aside, of
+course, from an accumulation of dried grass in barns. To this end, she
+invaded the upper meadow a good many times, during the next few days,
+took a turn on the hay-rake, now and then helped load and unload,
+riding down to the barn on a mound of high-piled fragrance, and came
+to the conclusion that, as an activity, haymaking wasn't to be
+compared with knocking a ball back and forth across a net. To try
+one's hand at it might do well enough, now and then, to spice an
+otherwise luxurious life, but as a steady diet the thing was too
+unrelenting. One was driven by wind and sun; even the clouds took a
+hand in cudgeling one on. A person must keep at it whether she cared
+to or not--in actual practice this point never troubled Elliott, who
+always stopped when she wished to--there were no spectators, and,
+heaviest demerit of all, it was undeniably hard work.
+
+But she was curious to discover what Laura found in it, and you know
+Elliott Cameron well enough by this time to understand that she was
+not a girl who hesitated to ask for information.
+
+The last load had dashed into the big red barn two minutes before a
+thunder-shower, and Laura, freshly tubbed and laundered, was winding
+her long black braids around her shapely little head. Elliott sat on
+the bed and watched her.
+
+"Aren't you glad it's done?" she asked.
+
+"The haying? Oh, yes, I'm always glad when we have it safely in. But I
+love it."
+
+"Really? It isn't work for girls."
+
+"No? Then once a year I'll take a vacation from being a girl. But that
+doesn't hold now, you know. Everything is work for girls that girls
+can do, to help win this war."
+
+"To help win the war?" echoed Elliott, and blankly and suddenly shut
+her mouth. Why, she supposed it did help, after all! But it was their
+work, the kind of thing they had always done, up here at the Cameron
+Farm; only, as Bruce had assured her, the girls hadn't done much of
+it. Was that what Bruce had meant, too?
+
+"Why did you suppose we put so much more land under cultivation this
+year than we ever had before, with less help in sight?" Laura
+questioned. "Just for fun, or for the money we could get out of it?"
+
+"I hadn't thought much about it," said Elliott. She was thinking now.
+Had she been a bit of a slacker? She loathed slackers.
+
+"I never thought of it as war work," she said. "Stupid, wasn't I?"
+
+Laura put the last hair-pin in place. "Just thought of it as our job,
+did you? So it is, of course. But when your job happens to be war work
+too--well, you just buckle down to it extra hard. I've never been so
+thankful as this year and last that we have the farm. It gives every
+one of us such a splendid chance to feel we're really counting in this
+fight--the boys over there and in camp, the rest of us here." Laura's
+dark eyes were beginning to shine. "Oh, I wouldn't be anywhere but on
+a farm for anything in the wide world, unless, perhaps, somewhere in
+France!"
+
+She stopped suddenly, put down the hand-mirror with which she was
+surveying her back hair, and blushed. "There!" she said, "I forgot all
+about the fact that you weren't born on a farm, too. But then, you can
+share ours for a year, so I'm not going to apologize for a word I've
+said, even if I have been bragging because I'm so lucky."
+
+Bragging because she was lucky! And Laura meant it. There was not the
+ghost of a pose in her frank, downright young pride. Her cousin felt
+like a person who has been walking down-stairs and tries to step off a
+tread that isn't there. Elliott's own cheeks reddened as she thought
+of the patronizing pity she had felt. Luckily, Laura hadn't seemed to
+notice it. And Laura was quick to see things, too. Elliott realized,
+with a little stab of chagrin, that Laura wouldn't understand why her
+cousin had pitied her, even if some one should be at pains to explain
+the fact to her.
+
+But Elliott couldn't let herself pass as an intentional slacker.
+
+"We girls did canteening at home; surgical dressings and knitting,
+too, of course, but canteening was the most fun."
+
+"That must have been fine." Laura was interested at once.
+
+Elliott's spirit revived. After all, Laura was a country girl. "Do you
+have a canteen here?"
+
+"Oh, no, Highboro isn't big enough. No trains stop here for more than
+a minute. We're not on the direct line to any of the camps, either."
+
+"Ours was a regular canteen," said Elliott. "They would telephone us
+when soldiers were going through, and we would go down, with Mrs.
+Royce or Aunt Margaret or some other chaperon, and distribute
+post-cards and cigarettes and sweet chocolate; and ice-cream cones, if
+the weather was hot. It was such fun to talk to the men!"
+
+"Ice-cream and cigarettes!" laughed Laura. "I should think they'd have
+liked something nourishing."
+
+"Oh, they got the nourishing things, if it was time. The Government
+had an arrangement with a restaurant just around the corner to serve
+soldiers' meals. We didn't have to do that."
+
+"You supplied the frills."
+
+"Yes." Somehow Elliott did not quite like the words.
+
+Laura was quick to notice her discomfiture. "I imagine they needed the
+frills and the jollying, poor lonesome boys! They're so young, many of
+them, and not used to being away from home; and the life is strange,
+however well they may like it."
+
+"Yes," said Elliott. "More than one bunch told us they hadn't seen
+anything to equal what we did for them this side of New York. Our
+uniforms were so becoming, too; even a plain girl looked cute in those
+caps. Why, Laura, you might have a uniform, mightn't you, if it's war
+work?"
+
+"What should I want of a uniform?"
+
+"People who saw you would know what you're doing."
+
+"They know now, if they open their eyes."
+
+"They'd know why, I mean--that it's war work."
+
+"Mercy! Nobody around here needs to be told why a person hoes potatoes
+these days. They're all doing it."
+
+"Do you hoe potatoes?" Elliott had no notion how comically her
+consternation sat on her pretty features.
+
+Laura laughed at the amazed face of her cousin. "Of course I do, when
+potatoes need hoeing."
+
+"But do you like it?"
+
+"Oh, yes, in a way. Hoeing potatoes isn't half bad."
+
+Elliott opened her lips to say that it wasn't girls' work, remembered
+that she had made that remark once before, and changed to, "It is hard
+work, and it isn't a bit interesting."
+
+Then Laura asked two questions that left Elliott gasping. "Don't you
+like to do anything except what is easy? Though I don't know that it
+is any harder to hoe potatoes for an hour than to play tennis that
+length of time. And anything is interesting, don't you think, that has
+to be done?"
+
+"Goodness, _no_!" ejaculated Elliott, when she found her voice. "I
+don't think that at all! Do you, really?"
+
+"Why, yes!" Laura laughed a trifle deprecatingly. "I'm not bluffing. I
+never thought I'd care to spray potatoes, but one day it had to be
+done, and Father and the boys were needed for something else. It
+wasn't any harder to do than churning, and I found it rather fun to
+watch the potato-bugs drop off. I calculated, too, how many Belgians
+the potatoes in those hills would feed, either directly or by setting
+wheat free, you know. I forget now how many I made it. I know I felt
+quite exhilarated when I was through. Trudy helped."
+
+"Goodness!" murmured Elliott faintly. For a minute she could find no
+other words. Then she managed to remark: "Of course every one gardens
+at home. They have lots at the country club, and raise potatoes and
+things, and you hear them talking everywhere about bugs and blight and
+cold pack. I never paid much attention. It didn't seem to be meant for
+girls. The men and boys raise the things and the wives and mothers can
+them. That's the way we do at home."
+
+"Traditional," nodded Laura. "We divide on those lines here to a
+certain extent, too; but we're rather Jacks of all trades on this
+farm. The boys know how to can and we girls to make hay."
+
+"The boys _can_?"
+
+"Tom put up all our string-beans last summer quite by himself. What
+does it matter who does a thing, so it's done?"
+
+Laura was dressed now, from the crown of her smooth black head to the
+tip of her white canvas shoes, and a very satisfactory operation she
+had made of it. Elliott dismissed Laura's last remark, which had not
+sounded very sensible to her--of course it mattered who did things;
+why, that sometimes was all that did matter!--and reflected that,
+country bred though she was, her cousin Laura had an air that many a
+town girl might have envied. An ability to find hard manual work
+interesting did not seem to preclude the knowledge of how to put on
+one's clothes.
+
+But Laura's hands were not all that hands should be, by Elliott's
+standard; they were well cared for, and as white as soap and water
+could make them, but there are some things that soap and water cannot
+do when it is pitted against sun and wind and contact with soil and
+berries and fruits. Elliott hadn't meant to look so fixedly at Laura's
+hands as to make her thought visible, and the color rose in her cheeks
+when Laura said, exactly as though she were a mind-reader, "If you
+prefer lily-white fingers to stirring around doing things, why, you
+have to sit in a corner and keep them lily-white. I like to stick mine
+into too many pies ever to have them look well."
+
+"They're a lovely shape," said Elliott, seriously.
+
+And then, to her amazement, Laura laughed and leaned over and hugged
+her. "And you're a dear thing, even if you do think my hands are no
+lady's!"
+
+Of course Elliott protested; but as that was just what she did think,
+her protestations were not very convincing.
+
+"You can't have everything," said Laura, quite as though she didn't
+mind in the least what her hands looked like. The strangest part of it
+all was that Elliott believed Laura actually didn't mind.
+
+But she didn't know how to answer her, Laura's words had raised the
+dust on all those comfortable cushiony notions Elliott had had sitting
+about in her mind for so long that she supposed they were her very own
+opinions. Until the dust settled she couldn't tell what she thought,
+whether they belonged to her or had simply been dumped on her by other
+people. She couldn't remember ever having been in such a position
+before.
+
+Yes, Elliott found a good deal to think of. One had to draw the line
+somewhere; she had told herself comfortably; but lines seemed to be
+very queerly jumbled up in this war. If a person couldn't canteen or
+help at a hostess house or do surgical dressings or any of the other
+things that had always stood in her mind for girl's war work, she had
+to do what she could, hadn't she? And if it wasn't necessary to be
+tagged, why, it wasn't. Laura in blouse and short skirt, or even in
+overalls, seemed to accomplish as much as any possible Laura in a
+pantaloon suit or puttees or any other land uniform. There really
+didn't seem any way out, now that Elliott understood the matter.
+Perhaps she had been rather dense not to understand it before.
+
+"What would you like me to do this morning, Uncle?" she asked the next
+day at the breakfast-table. "I think it is time I went to work."
+
+"Going to join the farmerettes?"
+
+"Thinking of it." She could feel, without seeing, Stannard's stare of
+astonishment. No one else gave signs of surprise. Stannard, thought
+the girl, really hadn't as good manners as his cousins.
+
+Uncle Bob surveyed the trim figure, arrayed in its dark smock and the
+shortest of all Elliott's short skirts. If he felt other than wholly
+serious he concealed the fact well.
+
+"The corn needs hoeing, both field-corn and garden-corn. How about
+joining that squad?"
+
+"It suits me."
+
+Corn--didn't Hoover urge people to eat corn? In helping the corn crop,
+she too might feel herself feeding the Belgians.
+
+Gertrude linked her arm in her slender cousin's as they left the
+table. "I'll show you where the tools are," she said. "Harry runs the
+cultivator in the field, but we use hand-hoes in the garden."
+
+"You will have to show me more than that," said Elliott. "What does
+hoeing do to corn, anyhow?"
+
+"Keeps down the weeds that eat up the nourishment in the soil,"
+recited Gertrude glibly, "and by stirring up the ground keeps in the
+moisture. You like to know the reason for things, too, don't you? I'm
+glad. I always do."
+
+It wasn't half bad, with a hoe over her shoulder, in company with
+other boys and girls, to swing through the dewy morning to the garden.
+Priscilla had joined the squad when she heard Elliott was to be in it,
+and with Stannard and Tom the three girls made a little procession. It
+proved a simple enough matter to wield a hoe. Elliott watched the
+others for a few minutes, and if her hills did not take on as
+workmanlike an appearance as Tom's and Gertrude's, or even as
+Priscilla's, they all assured her practice would mend the fault.
+
+"You'll do it all right," Priscilla encouraged her.
+
+"Sure thing!" said Tom. "We might have a race and see who gets his row
+done first."
+
+"No races for me, yet," said Elliott. "It would be altogether too
+tame. I'd qualify for the booby prize without trying. But the rest of
+you may race, if you want to."
+
+"Just wait!" prophesied Stannard darkly. "Wait an hour or two and see
+how you like hoeing."
+
+Elliott laughed. In the cool morning, with the hoe fresh in her hand,
+she thought of fatigue as something very far away. Stan was always a
+little inclined to croak. The thing was easy enough.
+
+"Run along, little boy, to your row," she admonished him. "Can't you
+see that I'm busy?"
+
+Elliott hoed briskly, if a bit awkwardly, and painstakingly removed
+every weed. The freshly stirred earth looked dark and pleasant; the
+odor of it was good, too. She compared what she had done with what she
+hadn't, and the contrast moved her to new activity. But after a
+time--it was not such a long time, either, though it seemed hours--she
+thought it would be pleasant to stop. The motion of the hoe was
+monotonous. She straightened up and leaned on the handle and surveyed
+her fellow-workers. Their backs looked very industrious as they bent
+at varying distances across the garden. Even Stannard had left her
+behind.
+
+Gertrude abandoned her row and came and inspected Elliott's. "That
+looks fine," she said, "for a beginner. You must stop and rest
+whenever you're tired. Mother always tells us to begin a thing easy,
+not to tire ourselves too much at first. She won't let us girls work
+when the sun's too hot, either."
+
+Elliott forced a smile. If she had done what she wished to, she would
+have thrown down her hoe and walked off the field. But for the first
+time in her life she didn't feel quite like letting herself do what
+she wished to.
+
+What would these new cousins think of her if she abandoned a task
+as abruptly as that? But what good did her hoeing do?--a few
+scratches on the border of this big garden-patch. It couldn't
+matter to the Belgians or the Germans or Hoover or anybody else
+whether she hoed or didn't hoe. Perhaps, if every one said that,
+even of garden-patches--but not every one would say it. Some people
+knew how to hoe. Presumably some people liked hoeing. Goodness, how
+long this row was! Would she ever, _ever_ reach the end?
+
+Priscilla bobbed up, a moist, flushed Priscilla. "That looks nice. You
+haven't got very far yet, have you? Never mind. Things go a lot faster
+after you've done 'em a while. Why, when I first tried to play the
+piano, my fingers went so slow, they just made me ache. Now they skip
+along real quick."
+
+Elliott leaned on her hoe. "Do you play the piano?"
+
+"Oh, yes! Mother taught me. Good-by. I must get back to my row."
+
+"Do you like hoeing?" Elliott called after her.
+
+"I like to get it done." The small figure skipped nimbly away.
+
+"'Get it done!'" Elliott addressed the next clump of waving green
+blades, pessimism in her voice. "After one row, isn't there another,
+and another, and _another_, forever?" She slashed into a mat of
+chickweed with venom.
+
+"I knew you'd get tired," said Stannard, at her elbow. "Come on over
+to those trees and rest a bit. Sun's getting hot here."
+
+Elliott looked at the clump of trees on the edge of the field. Their
+shade invited like a beckoning hand. Little beads of perspiration
+stood on her forehead. A warm lassitude spread through her body,
+turning her muscles slack. Hadn't Gertrude said Aunt Jessica didn't
+let them work in too hot a sun?
+
+"You're tired; quit it!" urged Stannard.
+
+"Not just yet," said Elliott, and her hoe bit at the ground again.
+
+Tired? She should think she was tired! And she had fully intended to
+go with Stan. Then why hadn't she gone? The question puzzled the girl.
+Quit when you like and make it up with cajolery was a motto that
+Elliott had found very useful. She was good at cajolery. What made her
+hesitate to try it now?
+
+She swung around, half minded to call Stannard back, when a sentence
+flashed into her mind, not a whole sentence, just a fragment salvaged
+from a book some one had once been reading in her hearing: "This war
+will be won by tired men who--" She couldn't quite get the rest. An
+impression persisted of keeping everlastingly at it, but the words
+escaped her. She swung back, her hail unsent. Well, she was tired,
+dead tired, and her back was broken and her hands were blistered, or
+going to be, but nobody would think of saying that that had anything
+to do with winning the war. Stay; wouldn't they? It seemed absurd;
+but, still, what made people harp so on food if there weren't
+something in it? If all they said was true, why--and Elliott's tired
+back straightened--why, she was helping a little bit; or she would be
+if she didn't quit.
+
+It may seem absurd that it had taken a backache to make Elliott
+visualize what her cousins were really doing on their farm. She ought,
+of course, to have been able to see it quite clearly while she sat on
+the veranda, but that isn't always the way things work. Now she seemed
+to see the farm as part of a great fourth line of defense, a trench
+that was feeding all the other trenches and all the armies in the open
+and all the people behind the armies, a line whose success was
+indispensable to victory, whose defeat would spell failure everywhere.
+It was only for a minute that she saw this quite clearly, with a kind
+of illuminated insight that made her backache well worth while. Then
+the minute passed, and as Elliott bent to her hoe again she was aware
+only of a suspicion that possibly when one was having the most fun was
+not always when one was being the most useful.
+
+"Well," said a pleasant voice, "how does the hoeing go?"
+
+And there stood Laura with a pitcher in her hand, and on her face a
+look--was it of mingled surprise and respect?
+
+"You mustn't work too long the first day," she told Elliott. "You're
+not hardened to it yet, as we are. Take a rest now and try it again
+later on. I have your book under my arm."
+
+When, that noon, they all trooped up to the house, hot and hungry,
+Elliott went with them, hot and hungry, too. Nobody thanked her for
+anything, and she didn't even notice the lack. Farming wasn't like
+canteening, where one expected thanks. As she scrubbed her hands she
+noticed that her nails were hopeless, but her attention failed to
+concentrate on their demoralized state. Hadn't she finished her row?
+
+"Stuck it out, did you?" said Bruce, as they sat down at dinner. "I
+bet you would."
+
+"I shouldn't have dared look any of you in the face again, if I
+hadn't," smiled Elliott. But his words rang warm in her ears.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+FLIERS
+
+
+Laura and Elliott were in the summer kitchen, filling glass jars with
+raspberries. As they finished filling each jar, they capped it and
+lowered it into a wash-boiler of hot water on the stove.
+
+"It seems odd," remarked Laura, "to put up berries without sugar."
+
+"Isn't it horrid," said Elliott, who had never put up berries at all,
+but who was longing for candy and hadn't had courage to suggest buying
+any. "I hope the Allies are going to appreciate all we are doing for
+them."
+
+"Do you?" Laura looked at her oddly. "I hope we are going to
+appreciate all they have done for us."
+
+"Aren't we showing it?" Elliott felt really indignant at her cousin.
+"Think of the sacrifices we're making for them."
+
+"Sacrifices?"
+
+How stupid Laura was! "You know as well as I do how many things we are
+giving up."
+
+"Sugar, for instance?" queried Laura.
+
+"Sugar is one thing."
+
+"Oh, well," said Laura, "I'd rather a little Belgian had my extra
+pounds, poor scrap! Of course, now and then I get hungry for it,
+though Mother gives us all the maple we want, but when I do get
+hungry, I think about the Belgians and the people of northern France
+who have lost their homes, and of all those children over there who
+haven't enough to eat to make them want to play; and I think about the
+British fleet and what it has kept us from for four years; and about
+the thousands of girls who have given their youth and prettiness to
+making munitions. I think about things like that and then I say to
+myself, 'My goodness, what is a little sugar, more or less!' Why,
+Elliott, we don't begin to feel the war over here, not as they feel
+it!"
+
+Elliott, who considered that she felt the war a good deal, demurred.
+"I have lost my home," she said, feeling a little ashamed of the words
+as she said them.
+
+"But it is there," objected Laura. "Your home is all ready to go back
+to, isn't it? That's my point."
+
+"And there's Father," said Elliott.
+
+"I know, and my brothers. But I don't feel that _I_ have done anything
+in their being in the army. It is doing them lots of good: every
+letter shows that. And, anyway, I'd be ashamed if they didn't go."
+
+"Something might happen," said Elliott. "What would you say then?"
+
+"The same, I hope. But what I mean is, the war doesn't really touch us
+in the routine of our every-day living. _We_ don't have to darken our
+windows at night and take, every now and then, to the cellars. The
+machinery of our lives isn't thrown out of gear. We don't live hand in
+hand with danger. But lots of us think we're killed if we have to use
+our brains a little, if we're asked to substitute for wheat flour, and
+can't have thick frosting on our cake and eat meat three times a day.
+Oh, I've heard 'em talk! Why, our life over here isn't really
+topsyturvy a bit!"
+
+"Isn't it?" There were things, Elliott thought, that Laura, wise as
+she was, didn't know.
+
+"We're inconvenienced," said Laura, "but not hurt."
+
+Elliott was silent. She was trying to decide whether or not she was
+hurt. Inconvenienced seemed rather a slim verb for what had happened
+to her. But she didn't go on to say what she had meant to say about
+candy, and she felt in her secret soul the least bit irritated at
+Laura.
+
+Then Priscilla whirled in on her tiptoes, her hands behind her back.
+"The postman went right straight by, though I hung out the window and
+called and called. I guess he didn't hear me, he's awful deaf
+sometimes."
+
+"Didn't I get a letter?" Elliott's face fell.
+
+"Mail is slow getting through, these days," said Aunt Jessica, coming
+in from the main kitchen. "We always allow an extra day or two on the
+road. Wasn't there anything at all from Bob or Sidney or Pete, Pris?
+You little witch, you certainly are hiding something behind your
+back."
+
+Then Priscilla gave a gay little squeal and jumped up and down till
+her black curls bobbed all over her face. When she stopped jumping she
+looked straight at Elliott.
+
+"Which hand will you take?" she asked.
+
+"I? Oh, have you a letter for me, after all?"
+
+"You didn't guess it," said the child. "Which hand?"
+
+"The right--no, the left."
+
+Priscilla shook her head. "You aren't a very good guesser, are you?
+But I'll give it to you this time. It's not fat, but it looks nice. He
+didn't even get out, that postman didn't; he just tucked the letter in
+the box as he rode along."
+
+"Certain sure he didn't tuck any other letter in too, Pris?" queried
+Laura.
+
+The child held out empty hands.
+
+"That's no proof. Your eyes are too bright." Laura turned her around
+gently. "Oh, I thought so! Stuck in your dress. From Bob!"
+
+"Two," squealed Priscilla, with an emphatic little hop. "Here, give
+'em to Mother. They're 'dressed to her. Now let's get into 'em, quick.
+Shall I ring the bell, Mother, to call in Father and the rest? Two
+letters from Bob is a great big emergency; don't you think so?"
+
+The words filtered negligently through Elliott's inattention. All her
+conscious thoughts were centered on her father's handwriting. She had
+had a cable before, but this was his first letter. It almost made her
+cry to see the familiar script and know that she could get nothing but
+letters from him for a whole long year. No hugs, no kisses, no
+rumpling of her hair or his, no confidential little talks--no anything
+that had been her meat and drink for years. How did people endure such
+separations? A big lump came up in her throat and the tears pricked
+her eyes; but she swallowed very hard and blinked once or twice and
+vowed, "I won't cry, I _won't_!"
+
+And then suddenly, through her preoccupation, she became aware of a
+hush fallen on the bubbling expectancy of the room. Glancing up from
+the page, she saw Henry standing in the doorway. Even to unfamiliar
+eyes there was something strangely arresting in the boy's look, a
+shocked gravity that cut like a premonition.
+
+"They say Ted Gordon's been killed," he said.
+
+"Ted--Gordon!" cried Laura.
+
+"Practice flight, at camp. Nobody knows any particulars. Cy Jones told
+Father." The boy's voice sounded dry and hard.
+
+"Are they certain there is no mistake?" his mother asked quietly.
+
+"I guess it's true. Cy said the Gordons had a telegram."
+
+"I must go over at once." Mrs. Cameron rose, putting the letters into
+Laura's hands, and took off her apron.
+
+"I'll bring the car around for you," said Henry.
+
+"Thank you." She smiled at him and turned to the girls. "You know what
+we are having for dinner, Laura. Priscilla will help make the
+shortcake, I'm sure. I will be back as soon as I can."
+
+Mutely the four watched the little car roll out of the yard and down
+the hill.
+
+Then Henry spoke. "Letters?"
+
+"From Bob," said Laura.
+
+"Did she read 'em?"
+
+Laura shook her head.
+
+"Gee!" said the boy.
+
+"Perhaps she thought she couldn't," hesitated Laura, "and go over
+there."
+
+A moment of silence held the room. Henry broke it. "Well, we're not
+going. Let's hear 'em."
+
+Elliott took a step toward the door.
+
+"Needn't run away unless you want to," he called after her. "We always
+read Bob's letters aloud."
+
+So Elliott stayed. Laura's pleasant voice, a bit strained at first,
+grew steadier as the reading proceeded. Henry sat whittling a stick
+into the coal-hod, his lips pursed as though for a whistle, but
+without sound, and still with that odd sober look on his face.
+Priscilla, all the jumpiness gone out of her, stood very still in the
+middle of the kitchen floor, a kind of hurt bewilderment in the big
+dark eyes fixed on Laura's face. Nobody laughed, nobody even chuckled,
+and yet it was a jolly letter that they read first, full of spirit and
+life and fun. High-hearted adventure rollicked through it, and the
+humor that makes light of hardship, and the latest slang of the front
+adorned its pages with grotesquely picturesque phrases. The Cameron
+boys were obviously getting a good time out of the war. Bob had got
+something else, too. The letter had been delayed in transmission and
+near the end was a sentence, "Brought down my first Hun to-day--great
+fight! I'll tell you about it next time if after due deliberation I
+decide the censor will let me."
+
+"Some letter!" commented Henry. "Say, those aviators are living like
+princes, aren't they! Mess hall in a big grove with all the fixings.
+And eats! More than we get at home. Gee, I wish I was older!"
+
+"So you could come in for the eats?" smiled his sister.
+
+"So I could come in for things generally."
+
+"You couldn't work any harder if you were a man grown," she told him.
+
+"Huh!" said Henry, "a lot I hurt myself!" But he liked the smile and
+the praise, wary though he might pretend to be of it. Sis was a good
+sort. "You're some worker, yourself. Let's get on to the next one."
+
+The second letter--and it too bore a date disquietingly far from the
+present--told of the fight. It thrilled the four in the pleasant New
+England kitchen. The peaceful walls opened wide, and they were out in
+far spaces, patrolling the windy sky, mounting, diving, dodging
+through wisps of cloud, kings of the air, hunting for combat. Their
+eyes shone and their breathing quickened, and for a minute they forgot
+the boy who was dead.
+
+"Why the Hun didn't bag me, instead of my getting him," wrote Bob, "is
+a mystery. Just the luck of beginners, I guess. I did most of the
+things I shouldn't have done, and, by chance, one or two of the things
+I should--fired when I was too far off, went into a spinning nose-dive
+under the mistaken notion it would make me a poor target, etc., etc.,
+etc. Oh, I was green, all right! He knew how to manoeuver, that Hun
+did. That's what feazes me. How did I manage to top him at last? Well,
+I did. And my gun didn't jam. Nuff said."
+
+"Gee!" said Henry between his teeth. "And Ted Gordon had to go and
+miss all that! Gee!"
+
+"If he had only got to the front!" sighed Laura.
+
+"Anything from Pete?" asked the boy.
+
+"No."
+
+"Sid?"
+
+She shook her head. "We had a letter from Sid day before yesterday,
+you know."
+
+"Sid lays 'em down pretty thick sometimes. Well, I must be getting on.
+This isn't weeding cabbages."
+
+The three girls, left alone, reacted each in her own way to the touch
+of the dark wings that had so suddenly brushed the rim of their blithe
+young lives. Priscilla frankly didn't understand, but her sensitive
+spirit felt the chill of the event, and her big eyes gazed with a
+tinge of wonder at the blue sky and sunshine of the world outside.
+
+"Seems sort of queer it's so bright," she remarked.
+
+Laura was busy, as were thousands of sisters at that very minute and
+every minute all over the land, scotching the fears that are always
+lying in wait, ready to lift their ugly heads. Queer the letters had
+come through so tardily! Where was Bob, her darling big brother, this
+minute? Where was Pete Fearing, hardly less dear than Bob? Pictures
+clicked through her brain, pictures built on newspaper prints that she
+had seen. But one died twice that way, she reflected, and it did no
+good. So she put the letters on the shelf beside the clock and brought
+out the potatoes for dinner.
+
+"Ted Gordon was in the Yale Battery last summer," she remarked. "He
+came up from camp to get his degree this year. Mrs. Gordon and Harriet
+went down. He was Scroll and Key."
+
+In Elliott's brain Laura's words made a swift connection. Before that,
+Ted Gordon had meant nothing to her, the name of a boy whom she had
+never seen, a country lad, whose death, while sudden and sad, could
+not touch her. Now, suddenly, he clicked into place in her own
+familiar world. A Scroll-and-Key man? Why, those were the men she
+knew--Bones, Scroll and Key, Hasty Pudding--he was one of them!
+
+She felt a swift recoil. So that was what war came to. Not just natty
+figures in khaki that girls cried over in saying good-by to, or smiled
+at and told how perfectly splendid they were to go; not just high
+adventure and martial music and the rhythm of swinging brown
+shoulders; not just surgical dressings and socks and sweaters; not
+even just homes broken up for a time and fathers sailing overseas. Of
+course one understood with one's brain, that made part of the thrill
+of their going, but one didn't realize with the feeling part of
+one--how could a girl?--when they went away or when one made
+dressings. Yet didn't dressings more than anything else point to it?
+And Laura had said we didn't feel the war over here!
+
+A sense of something intolerable, not to be borne, overwhelmed
+Elliott. She pushed at it with both hands, as though by the physical
+gesture she could shove away the sudden darkness that had blotted with
+alien shadow the face of her familiar sun. Death! There was an
+unbearable unpleasantness about death. She had always felt ill at ease
+in its presence, in the very mention of its name; she had avoided
+every sign and symbol of it as she would a plague. And now, she
+foresaw for an instant of blinding clarity, perhaps it could not be
+avoided any longer. Was this young aviator's accident just a symbol of
+the way death was going to invade all the happy sheltered places? The
+thought turned the girl sick for a minute. How could Laura go on with
+her work so unfeelingly? And there was Priscilla getting out
+raspberries.
+
+"I don't see," said Elliott, and her voice choked, "I don't see how
+you can _bear_ to peel those potatoes!"
+
+"Some one has to peel them," said Laura. "The family must have dinner,
+you know. We couldn't work without eating. Besides, I think it helps
+to work."
+
+Elliott brushed the last sentence aside. It fell outside her
+experience, and she didn't understand it. The only thing she did
+understand was the reiteration of work, work, and the pall of
+blackness that overshadowed her hitherto bright world. She wished
+again with all her heart that she had never come to Vermont. She
+didn't belong here; why couldn't she have stayed where she did belong,
+where people understood her, and she them?
+
+A great wave of homesickness swept over the girl, homesickness for the
+world as she had always known it, her world as it had been before the
+war warped and twisted and spoiled things. And yet, oddly enough,
+there was no sense in the Cameron house of anything being spoiled.
+They talked of Ted Gordon in the same unbated tone of voice in which
+they spoke of her cousin Bob or of his friend Pete Fearing, and they
+actually laughed when they told stories about him. Laura baked and
+brewed, and the results disappeared down the road in the direction
+Mother Jess had taken. Aunt Jessica herself returned, a trifle pale
+and tired-looking, but smiling as usual.
+
+"Lucinda and Harriet are just as brave as you would expect them to
+be," Elliott heard her tell Father Bob. "No one knows yet how it
+happened. They hope to learn more from Ted's friends. Two of the
+aviators are coming up. Harriet told me they rather look for them
+to-morrow night."
+
+Hastily Elliott betook herself out of hearing. She wanted to get
+beyond sight and sound of any reference to what had happened. It was
+the only way known to her to escape the disagreeable--to turn her back
+on it and run away. What she didn't see and think about, so far as she
+was concerned, wasn't there. Hitherto the method had worked very well.
+What disquieted her now was a dull, persistent fear that it wasn't
+going to work much longer.
+
+So when Bruce remarked the next day, "I'm going to take part of the
+afternoon off and go for ferns; want to come?" she answered promptly,
+"Yes, indeed," though privately she thought him crazy. Ferns, on a
+perfectly good working-day? But when they were fairly started, she
+found she hadn't escaped, after all. Instead, she had run right into
+the thing, so to speak.
+
+"We want to make the church look pretty," Bruce said, as they tramped
+along. "And I happen to know where some beauties grow, maidenhair and
+the rarer sorts. It isn't everybody I'd dare to take along."
+
+"Is that so?" queried the girl. She wondered why.
+
+"Things have a way of disappearing in the woods, unless they're treated
+right. Took a fellow with me once when I went for pink-and-white
+lady's-slippers, the big ones--they're beauties. He was crazy to go, and
+he promised to keep the place to himself. You could have picked bushels
+there then. Now they're all cleaned out."
+
+"But why? Did people dig them up?"
+
+"Picked'em too close. Some things won't stand being cleaned up the way
+most people clean up flowers in the woods. They're free, and nobody's
+responsible."
+
+In spite of her thoughts Elliott dimpled. "I think it is quite safe to
+take me."
+
+He grinned. "Maybe that's why I do it."
+
+It was very pleasant, tramping along with Bruce in the bright day;
+pleasant, too, leaving the sunshine for the spicy coolness of the
+woods, and climbing up, up, among great tree-trunks and mossy rocks
+and trickling mountain brooks. Or it would have been pleasant, if
+one could only have forgotten the reason that underlay their
+journey. But when they had reached Bruce's secret spot and were
+cutting the wiry brown stems, and packing together carefully the
+spreading, many-fingered fronds so as not to break the delicate
+ferns, that undercurrent of numb consternation reasserted itself. Like
+Priscilla, Elliott felt a little shocked at the brightness of the
+sunshine, the blueness of the sky, and the beauty of the fern-filled
+glade.
+
+"It was dreadful for him to be killed before he had done anything!" At
+last the words so long burning in her heart reached the tip of her
+tongue.
+
+"Yes." Bruce's voice was sober. "It sure was hard."
+
+[Illustration: Cutting the wiry brown stems in the fern-filled glade.]
+
+"I should think his people would feel as though they couldn't _stand_
+it!" Elliott declared. "If he had got to France--but now it is just a
+hideous, hideous waste!"
+
+Bruce hesitated. "I suppose that is one way of looking at it."
+
+"Why, what other way could there be?" She stared at him in surprise.
+"He was just learning to fly. He hadn't done anything, had he?"
+
+"No, he hadn't done anything. But what he died for is just the same as
+though he had got across, isn't it, and had downed forty Huns?"
+
+She continued to stare fixedly at the boy for a full minute. "Why,
+yes," she said at last, very slowly; "yes, I suppose it is." Curiously
+enough, the whole thing looked better from that angle.
+
+For a long time she was silent, cutting and tying up ferns.
+
+"How did you happen to think of that?"
+
+"To think of what?" Bruce was tying his own ferns.
+
+"What you said about--about _what_ this Ted Gordon died for."
+
+It was Bruce's turn to look surprised. "I didn't think of anything.
+It's just a fact, isn't it?"
+
+Then he began to load himself with ferns. Elliott wouldn't have
+supposed any one could carry as many as Bruce shouldered; he had great
+bunches in his hands, too.
+
+"You look like a walking fernery," she said.
+
+"Birnam Wood," he quoted and for a minute she couldn't think what he
+meant. "Better let me take some of those on the ground," he said.
+
+"No, indeed! I am going to do my share."
+
+Quietly he possessed himself of two of her bunches. "That's your
+share. It will be heavy enough before we get home."
+
+It was heavy, though not for worlds would Elliott have mentioned the
+fact. She helped Bruce put the ferns in water, and she went out at
+night and sprinkled them to keep them fresh; but she had an excuse
+ready when Laura asked if she would like to go over to the little
+white-spired church on the hill and help arrange them.
+
+Nothing would have induced her to attend the services, either, though
+afterward she wished that she had. There seemed to have been something
+so high and fine and--yes--so cheerful about them, so martial and
+exalted, that she wished she had seen for herself what they were like.
+In Elliott's mind gloom had always been inseparably linked with a
+funeral, gloom and black clothes. Whereas Laura and her mother and
+Gertrude and Priscilla wore white. A good many things at the Cameron
+farm were very odd.
+
+It was after every one had gone to bed and the lights were out that
+Elliott lay awake in her little slant-ceilinged room and worried and
+worried about Father, three thousand miles away. He wasn't an aviator,
+it was true, but in France wasn't the land almost as unsafe as the
+air? She had imagined so many things that might perfectly easily
+happen to him that she was on the point of having a little weep all by
+herself when Aunt Jessica came in. Did she know that Elliott was
+homesick? Aunt Jessica sat down on the bed, as she had sat that first
+night, and talked about comforting, commonplace things--about the new
+kittens, and how soon the corn might be ripe, and what she used to do
+when she was a girl in Washington. Elliott got hold of her hand and
+wound her own fingers in and out among Aunt Jessica's fingers, but in
+the end she spoke out the thing that was uppermost in her mind.
+
+"Mother Jess," she said, using unconsciously the Cameron term; "Mother
+Jess, I don't like death."
+
+She said it in a small, wabbly voice, because she felt very strongly
+and she wasn't used to talking about such things. But she had to say
+it. Though if the room hadn't been dark, I doubt if she could have got
+it out at all.
+
+"No, dear," said Aunt Jessica, quietly. "Most of us don't like death.
+I wonder if your feeling isn't due to the fact that you think of it as
+an end?"
+
+"What is it," asked Elliott, "but an end?" She was so astonished that
+her words sounded almost brusque.
+
+"I like to think of it as a coming alive," said Aunt Jessica, "a
+coming alive more vigorously than ever. The world is beginning to
+think of it so, too."
+
+Elliott lay still after Aunt Jessica had gone out of the room and
+tried to think about what she had said. It was quite the oddest thing
+that anybody had said yet. But all she really succeeded in thinking
+about was the quiet certainty in Aunt Jessica's voice, the comforting
+clasp of Aunt Jessica's arms, and the kiss still warm on her lips.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+PICNICKING
+
+
+"I feel like a picnic," said Mother Jess, "a genuine all-day-in-the-woods
+picnic."
+
+It was rather queer for a grown-up to say such a thing right out like
+a girl, Elliott thought, but she liked it. And Aunt Jessica was
+sitting back on her heels, just like a girl too, looking up from the
+border where she was working. Elliott had caught sight of her blue
+chambray skirt under a haze of blue larkspurs and had come over to see
+what she was doing. It proved to be weeding with a clawlike thing
+that, wielded by Aunt Jessica's right hand, grubbed out weeds as fast
+as she could toss them into a basket with her left. Elliott was
+surprised. Weeding a flower-bed when, as she happened to know, the
+garden beets weren't finished did not square with her notions of what
+was what on the Cameron farm. She was so surprised that she answered
+absently, "That sounds fine. I think I feel so, too," and kept on
+wondering about Aunt Jessica.
+
+"We usually have a picnic at this time of year when the haying is
+done," said that lady, and fell again to her weeding. "It is
+astonishing how fast a weed can grow. Look at that!" and she held up a
+spreading mat of green chickweed. "I have had to neglect the borders
+shamefully this summer."
+
+Elliott squatted down beside her and twined her fingers in a tuft of
+grass. "May I help?" She gave a little tug to the grass.
+
+"Delighted to have you. Look out! That's a Johnny-jump-up."
+
+"Is it? Goodness! I thought it was a weed!"
+
+"Here is one in blossom. Spare Johnny. He is a faithful friend till
+the winter snows."
+
+"Johnny-jump-up." Elliott's laughter gurgled over the name. "But he
+does rather jump up, doesn't he? Funny little pansy thing! Funny name,
+too."
+
+"Not so odd as a few others I know. Kiss-me-in-the-buttery, for
+instance."
+
+"Not really!"
+
+"Honest Injun, as Priscilla says."
+
+"These borders are sweet." The girl let her gaze wander up and down
+the curving lines of color splashed across the gentle slope of the
+hill. "But flowers don't stand much chance in a war year, do they? I
+know people at home who have plowed theirs up and planted potatoes."
+
+"A mistake," said Aunt Jessica, shaking the dirt vigorously from a
+fistful of sorrel. "A mistake, unless it is a question of life and
+death. We have too much land in this country to plow up our flowers,
+yet a while. And a war year is just the time when we need them most.
+No, I never feel I am wasting my time when I work among flowers."
+
+"But they're not _necessary_, are they?" questioned Elliott. "Of
+course, they're beautiful; but I thought luxuries had to go, just
+now."
+
+"Flowers a luxury? Oh, my dear little girl, put that notion out of
+your head quickly! American-beauty roses may be a luxury, and white
+lilacs in the dead of winter, but garden flowers, never! Wait till you
+see the daffodils dancing under those apple trees next spring!" And
+she nodded up the grassy slope at the apple trees as though she and
+they shared a delightful secret that Elliott did not yet know.
+
+Privately the girl held a different opinion about next spring, but she
+wondered why Aunt Jessica should talk of daffodils. They seemed rather
+lugged into a conversation in July.
+
+Mother Jess reached with her clawlike weeder far into the border. Her
+voice came back over her shoulder in little gusts of words as she
+worked. "Did you ever hear that saying of the Prophet?--'He that hath
+two loaves let him sell one and buy a flower of the narcissus; for
+bread is food for the body, but narcissus is food for the soul.'
+That's the way I feel about flowers. They are the least expensive way
+of getting beauty and we can't live without beauty, now less than
+ever, since they have destroyed so much of it in France. There! now I
+must stop for to-day. Don't you want to take this culling-basket and
+pick it full of the prettiest things you can find for Mrs. Gordon?
+Perhaps you would like to take it over to her, too. It isn't a very
+long walk."
+
+"But I've never met her."
+
+"That won't matter. Just tell her who you are and that you belong to
+us. Mrs. Gordon loves flowers, though she hasn't much time to tend
+them."
+
+"I shouldn't think any one could have less time than you."
+
+Aunt Jessica laughed. "Oh, I make time!"
+
+Elliott picked up the flat green basket, lifted the shears she found
+lying in it, and went hesitatingly up and down the borders. "What
+shall I pick?"
+
+"Anything. Suit yourself. Make the basket as pretty as you can. If you
+pick here and there, the borders won't show where you cut from them."
+
+Mother Jess gathered up gloves and tools, and went away, tugging her
+basket of weeds. Elliott, left behind, surveyed the borders
+critically. To cut without letting it appear that she had cut was
+evidently what Aunt Jessica wanted. She reached in and snipped off a
+spire of larkspur from the very back of the border, then stood back to
+see what had happened. No, if one hadn't known the stalk had been
+there, one wouldn't now know it was gone. The thing could be done,
+then. Cautiously she selected a head of white phlox. The result of
+that operation also was satisfactory.
+
+Up and down the flowery path she went, snipping busily. On the stalks
+of larkspur and phlox she laid a mass of pink snapdragons and white
+candytuft, tucking in here and there sprays of just-opening
+baby's-breath to give a misty look to the basket. A bunch of English
+daisies came next; they blossomed so fast one didn't have to pick and
+choose among them; one could just cut and cut. And oughtn't there to
+be pansies? "Pansies--that's for thoughts." Those wonderful purple
+ones with a sprinkling of the yellow--no, yellow would spoil the color
+scheme of the basket. These white beauties were just the thing. How
+lovely it all looked, blue and white and pink and purple!
+
+But there wasn't much fragrance. Eye and nose searched hopefully.
+Heliotrope!--just a spray or two. There, now it was perfect. Anybody
+would be glad to see a basket like that coming. Only, she did wish
+some one else were to carry it, or else that she knew the people. It
+might not be so bad if she knew the people. Why shouldn't Laura or
+Trudy take it? Elliott walked very slowly up to the house, debating
+the question. A week ago she wouldn't have debated; she would have
+said, "Oh, I can't possibly." Or so she thought.
+
+"How beautiful!" said Aunt Jessica's voice from the kitchen window.
+"You have made an exquisite thing, dear."
+
+Elliott rested the basket on the window ledge and surveyed it proudly.
+"Isn't it lovely? And I don't think cutting this has hurt the borders
+a bit."
+
+"I am sure not." Aunt Jessica's busy hands went back to her yellow
+mixing-bowl. "You know where the Gordons live, don't you?--in the big
+brick house at the cross-roads."
+
+"Yes," said Elliott, and her feet carried her out of the yard,
+stopping only long enough to let her get her pink parasol from the
+hall, and down the hill toward the cross-roads. It was odd about
+Elliott's feet, when she hadn't quite made up her mind whether or not
+she would go. Her feet seemed to have no doubt of it.
+
+The pink parasol threw a becoming light on her face, as she knew it
+would, and the odor of heliotrope rose pleasantly in her nostrils as
+she walked along. But the basket grew heavy, astonishingly heavy. She
+wouldn't have believed a culling-basket with a few flowers in it could
+weigh so much. The farther Elliott walked, the heavier it grew. And
+she hadn't gone a quarter of the way, either.
+
+A horse's feet coming up rapidly behind her turned the girl's steps to
+the side of the road. The horse drew abreast and stopped, prancing.
+"Want a lift?" asked the man in the wagon. He was a big grizzled
+farmer, a friend of her uncle's.
+
+Elliott nodded, smiling. "Oh, thank you!"
+
+"Purty flowers you've got there."
+
+"Aren't they lovely! Aunt Jessica is sending them to Mrs. Gordon."
+
+"That's right! That's right! Say, just look at them pansies, now!
+Flowers, they don't do nothin' but grow for that aunt of yours. She
+don't have to much more 'n look at 'em."
+
+Elliott laughed. "She weeds them, I happen to know. I helped her this
+afternoon."
+
+"Did you, now! But there's a difference in folks. Take my wife: she
+plants 'em and plants 'em, but she can't keep none. They up and die on
+her, sure thing."
+
+Elliott selected a purple pansy. "This looks to me as though it would
+like to get into your buttonhole, Mr. Blair."
+
+"Sho, now!" He flushed with pleasure, driving slowly as the girl
+fitted the pansy in place, a bit of heliotrope nestling beside it.
+"Smells good, don't it? Mother always had heliotrope in her garden.
+Takes me back to when I was a little shaver."
+
+Elliott's deft fingers were busy with the English daisies.
+
+"Now don't you go and spoil your basket."
+
+"No, indeed! see what a lot there are left. Here is a little nosegay
+for your wife. And thank you so much for the lift."
+
+He cranked the wheel and she jumped out, waving her hand as he drove
+on. Queer a man like that should love flowers!
+
+It was only when she was walking up the graveled path to the door of
+the brick house that she remembered to compose her face into a proper
+gravity. She felt nervous and ill at ease. But she needn't go in, she
+reminded herself, just leave the flowers at the door. If only there
+were a maid, which there probably wasn't! One couldn't count for
+certain on getting right away from these places where the people
+themselves met one at the door.
+
+"How do you do?" said a voice, advancing from the right. "What a
+lovely basket!"
+
+Elliott jumped. She was ready to jump at anything and she had been
+looking straight ahead without a single glance aside from a
+non-committal brick front. Now she saw a hammock swung between two
+trees, a hammock still swaying from the impact of the girl who had
+just left it.
+
+She was the biggest girl Elliott had ever seen, tall and fat and
+shapeless and very plain. She was all in white, which made her look
+bigger, and her skirt was at least three years old. There was a faint
+trickle of brown spots down the front of it, too, of which the girl
+seemed utterly unaware.
+
+"You don't have to tell me where those flowers come from," she said.
+"You are Laura Cameron's cousin, aren't you? Glad to know you."
+
+"Yes," said Elliott, "I am Elliott Cameron. Aunt Jessica sent these to
+your mother."
+
+The girl's fingers felt cool and firm as they touched Elliott's, the
+only pleasant impression she had yet gathered.
+
+"They look just like Mrs. Cameron. Sit down while I call Mother. Oh,
+she's not doing anything special. Mother!"
+
+Elliott, conducted through the house to a wide veranda, sank into a
+chair, conscious in every nerve of her own slender waistline. What
+must it feel like to be so big? A minute later she seemed to herself
+to be engulfed between two mountains of flesh. A woman--more unwieldy,
+more shapeless, more oppressive even than the girl--waddled across the
+veranda floor. What she said Elliott really didn't know; afterward
+phrases of pleasure came back to her vaguely. She distinctly
+remembered the creaking of the rocking-chair when the woman sat down
+and her own frightened feeling lest some vital part should give way
+under the strain.
+
+After a time, to her consciousness, mild blue eyes emerged from the
+mass of human bulk that fronted her; gray hair crinkled away from a
+broad white forehead. Then she perceived that Mrs. Gordon was not a
+very tall woman, not so tall as was her daughter. If anything, that
+made it worse, thought Elliott. Why, if she fell down, no one could
+tell which side up she ought to go--except, of course, head side on
+top. The idea gave her a hysterical desire to giggle. The fact that it
+would be so dreadful to laugh in this house made the desire almost
+uncontrollable.
+
+And then the big girl did laugh about something or other, laughed
+simply and naturally and really pleasantly. Elliott almost jumped
+again, she was so startled. To her, there was something repulsive in
+the sight of so much human flesh. At the same time it discouraged her.
+In the presence of these two she felt insignificant, even while she
+pitied them. She wished to get away, but instinctive breeding held her
+in her chair, chatting. She hoped what she said wasn't too inane; she
+didn't know quite what she did say.
+
+Just then suddenly Harriet Gordon asked a question: "Has your aunt
+said anything yet about a picnic this summer?"
+
+"I heard her say this afternoon that she felt just like one," said
+Elliott.
+
+Mother and daughter looked at each other triumphantly. "What did I
+tell you!" said one. "I thought it was about time," said the other.
+
+"Jessica Cameron always feels like a picnic in midsummer," Mrs. Gordon
+explained. "After the haying 's done. You tell her my little niece
+will want to go. Alma has been here three weeks and we haven't been
+able to do much for her. Do you think you will go, too, Harriet?"
+
+"I'd rather not this time, Mother."
+
+"The Bliss girls will probably go, and Alma knows them pretty well.
+She won't be lonesome."
+
+"Oh, no," said Elliott, "we will see that she isn't lonely."
+
+"Must you go? Tell Mrs. Cameron we will send our limousine whenever
+she says the word." On the way back through the house Harriet Gordon
+paused before the picture of a young man in aviator's uniform. "My
+brother," she said simply, and there was infinite pride in her voice.
+
+Elliott stumbled down the path to the road. She quite forgot to put up
+the pink parasol. She carried it closed all the way home. Were they
+limousine people? You would never have guessed it to look at them.
+Why, she knew about picnics of that kind!--motor-car, luncheon-kit
+picnics! But what a shame to be so big! Couldn't they _do_ something
+about it? Good as gold, of course, and in such terrible sorrow! They
+weren't unfeeling. The girl's voice when she said, "My brother,"
+proved that. It seemed as though knowing about them ought to make them
+attractive, but somehow it didn't. If they only understood how to
+dress, it would help matters. Queer, how nice boys could have such
+frumpy people! And Ted Gordon had been a perfectly nice boy. The
+picture proved that. But Aunt Jessica had been right about the
+flowers. The big woman and the farmer proved _that_. Altogether
+Elliott's mind was a queer jumble.
+
+"She said she'd send back the basket to-morrow, Aunt Jessica," she
+reported. "Said she wanted to sit and look at it for a while just as
+it was. And Miss Gordon asked me to tell you that whenever you were
+ready for the picnic you must let her know and she would send around
+their limousine."
+
+"If that isn't just like Harriet Gordon!" laughed Laura. "She is the
+wittiest girl! Didn't you like her, Elliott?"
+
+Elliott's eyes opened wide. "What is there witty in saying she would
+send their limousine?"
+
+Tom snorted. "Wait till you see it!"
+
+"Why, she meant their hay-wagon! We always use the Gordon hay-wagon
+for this midsummer picnic. That's a custom, too."
+
+Everybody laughed at the expression on Elliott's face.
+
+"Not up on the vernacular, Lot?" gibed Stannard.
+
+"When is the picnic to be, Mother?" asked Laura.
+
+"How about to-morrow?"
+
+"Better make it the day after," Father Bob suggested, and they all
+fell to discussing whom to ask.
+
+So far as Elliott could see they asked everybody except townspeople.
+The telephone was kept busy that night and the next morning in the
+intervals of Mother Jess's and the girls' baking. Elliott helped pack
+up dozens of turnovers and cookies and sandwiches and bottled quarts
+of lemonade.
+
+"The lemonade is for the children," said Laura. "The rest of us have
+coffee. Don't you love the taste of coffee that you make over a fire
+that you build yourself in the woods?"
+
+"On picnics I have always had my coffee out of a thermos bottle," said
+Elliott.
+
+"Oh, you poor _thing_! Why, you haven't had any good times at all,
+have you?"
+
+Laura looked so shocked that for a minute Elliott actually wondered
+whether she ever really had had any good times. Privately she wasn't
+at all sure that she was going to have a good time now, but she kept
+still about that doubt.
+
+"Aren't you afraid it may rain to-morrow?" she asked.
+
+"No, indeed! It never rains on things Mother plans."
+
+And it didn't. The morning of the picnic dawned clear and dewy and
+sparkling, as perfect a summer day as though it had been made to the
+Camerons' order. By nine o'clock the big hay-wagon had appeared,
+driven by Mr. Gordon himself, who said he was going to turn over the
+reins to Mr. Cameron when they reached the Gordon farm. Two more
+horses were hitched on and all the Camerons piled in, with enough
+boxes and baskets and bags of potatoes, one would think, to feed a
+small town, and away the hay-wagon went down the hill, stopping at
+house after house to take in smiling people, with more boxes and
+baskets and bags.
+
+It was all very care-free and gay, and Elliott smiled and chattered
+away with the rest; but in her heart of hearts she knew that there
+wasn't one of these boys and girls who squeezed into the capacious
+hay-wagon to whom she would have given a second glance, before coming
+up here to Vermont. Now she wondered whether they were all as
+negligible as they looked. And pretty soon she forgot that she had
+ever thought they looked negligible. It was the jolliest crowd she had
+ever been in. One or two were a bit quiet when they arrived, but soon
+even the shyest were talking, or at least laughing, in the midst of
+the happy hubbub. It seemed as though one couldn't have anything but a
+good time when the Camerons set out to be jolly. Alma Gordon and the
+little Bliss girls were the last to squeeze in and they rode away
+waving their hands violently to a short, fat woman and a tall, fat
+girl, who waved briskly from the brick house's front door.
+
+Then Mr. Cameron turned the horses into a mountain road and they began
+to climb. Up and up the wagon went with its merry load, through
+towering woods and open pastures and along hillsides where the woods
+had been cut and a tangle of underbrush was beginning to spring up
+among the stumps. And the higher the horses climbed the higher rose
+the jollity of the hay-wagon's company. The sun was hot overhead when
+they stopped. There were gray rocks and a tumbling mountain brook and
+a brown-carpeted pine wood. Everybody jumped out helter-skelter and
+began unloading the wagon or gathering fire-wood or dipping up water,
+or simply scampering around for joy of stretching cramped legs.
+
+It was surprising how soon a fire was burning on the gray stones and
+coffee bubbling in the big pail Mother Jess had brought; surprising,
+too, how good bacon tasted when you broiled it yourself on a forked
+stick and potatoes that you smooched your face on by eating them in
+their skins, black from the hot ashes that the boys poked them out of
+with green poles. Elliott knew now that she had never really picnicked
+before in her life and that she liked it. She liked it so much that
+she ate and ate and ate until she couldn't eat another mouthful.
+
+Perhaps she ate too much, but I doubt it. It is much more likely to
+have been the climb that she took in the hot sunshine directly after
+that dinner, and the climb wouldn't have hurt her, if she had ended
+the dinner without that last potato and the extra turnover and two
+cookies; or if she had rested a little before the climb. But perhaps,
+it wasn't either the dinner or the climb; it may have been the pink
+ice-cream of the evening before; or that time in the celery patch, the
+previous morning, when she had forgotten her hat and wouldn't go back
+to the house for it because Henry hadn't a hat on, and why should a
+girl need a hat more than a boy? Or it may have been all those things
+put together. She certainly had had a slight headache when she went to
+bed.
+
+Whatever caused it, the fact was that on the ride home Elliott began
+to feel very sick. The longer she rode the sicker she felt and the
+more appalled and ashamed and frightened she grew. What could be going
+to happen to her? And what awful exhibition was she about to make of
+herself before all these people to whom she had felt so superior?
+
+Before long people noticed how white she was and by the time the wagon
+reached the brick house at the cross-roads poor Elliott hardly cared
+if they did see it. Her pride was crushed by her misery. Mrs. Gordon
+and Harriet came out to welcome Alma home and they hesitated not a
+minute.
+
+"Have them bring her right in here, Jessica. No, no, not a mite of
+trouble! We'll keep her all night. You go right along home, you and
+Laura. Mercy me, if we can't do a little thing like this for you
+folks! She'll be all right in the morning."
+
+The words meant nothing to Elliott. She was quite beyond caring where
+she went, so that it was to a bed, flat and still and unmoving. But
+even in her distress she was conscious that, whatever came of it, she
+had had a good time.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+A BEE STING
+
+
+Elliott was wretchedly, miserably ill. She despised herself for it and
+then she lost even the sensation of self contempt in utter misery. She
+didn't care about anything--who helped her undress or where the
+undressing was done or what happened to her. Mercifully nobody talked;
+it would have killed her, she thought, to have to try to talk. They
+didn't even ask her how she felt. They only moved about quietly and
+did things. They put her to bed and gave her something to drink, after
+which for a time she didn't care if she did die; in fact, she rather
+hoped she would; and then the disgusting things happened and she felt
+worse and worse and then--oh wonder!--she began to feel better.
+Actually, it was sheer bliss just to lie quiet and feel how
+comfortable she was.
+
+"I am so sorry!" she murmured apologetically to a presence beside the
+bed. "I have made you a horrid lot of trouble."
+
+"Not a bit," said the presence, quietly. "So don't you begin worrying
+about that."
+
+And she didn't worry. It seemed impossible to worry about anything
+just then.
+
+"I feel lots better," she remarked, after a while.
+
+"That's right. I thought you would. Now I'm going to telephone your
+Aunt Jessica that you feel better, and you just lie quiet and go to
+sleep. Then you will feel better still. I'll put the bell right here
+beside the bed. If you want anything, tap it."
+
+The presence waddled away--the girl could feel its going in the tremor
+of the bed beneath her--and Elliott out of half-shut eyes looked into
+the room. The shades were partially drawn and the light was dim. A
+little breeze fluttered the white scrim curtain. The girl's lazy gaze
+traveled slowly over what she could see without moving her head. To
+move her head would have been too much trouble. What she saw was
+spotless and clean and countrified, the kind of room she would have
+scorned this morning; now she thought it the most peaceful place in
+the world. But she didn't intend to go to sleep in it. She meant
+merely to lie wrapped in that delicious mantle of well-being and
+continue to feel how utterly content she was. It seemed a pity to go
+to sleep and lose consciousness of a thing like that.
+
+But the first thing she knew she was waking up and the room was quite
+dark and she felt comfortable, but just the least bit queer. It
+couldn't be that she was hungry!
+
+She lay and debated the point drowsily until a streak of light fell
+across the bed. The light came from a kerosene lamp in the hands of an
+immense woman whose mild blue eyes beamed on Elliott.
+
+"There, you've waked up, haven't you? I guess you'll like a glass of
+milk now. You can bring it right up, Harriet. She's awake."
+
+The woman set down her lamp on a little table and lumbered about the
+room, adjusting the shades at the windows, while the lamp threw
+grotesque exaggerations on the wall. Elliott watched the shadows, a
+warm little smile at her heart. They were funny, but she found herself
+tender toward them. When the woman padded back to the bed the girl
+smiled, her cheek pillowed on her hand. She liked her there beside the
+bed, her big shapeless form totally obscuring the straight-backed
+chair. She didn't think of waist lines or clothes at all, only of how
+comfortable and cushiony and pleasant the large face looked.
+Mothery--might not that be the word for it? Somehow like Aunt Jessica,
+yet without the slightest resemblance except in expression, a kind of
+radiating lovingness that warmed one through and through, and made
+everything right, no matter how wrong it might have seemed.
+
+"I telephoned your Aunt Jessica," said the big woman. "She was just
+going to call us, and they all sent their love to you. Here's Harriet
+with the milk. Do you feel a mite hungry?"
+
+"I think that must be what was the matter with me. I was trying to
+decide when you came in."
+
+The fat form shook all over with silent laughter. It was fascinating
+to watch laughter that produced such a cataclysm but made no sound.
+Elliott forgot to drink in her absorption.
+
+"Mother," said Harriet Gordon, "Elliott thinks you're a three-ringed
+circus. You mustn't be so exciting till she has finished her milk."
+
+Elliott protested, startled. "I think you are the kindest people in
+the world, both of you!"
+
+"Mercy, child, anybody would have done the same! Don't you go to
+setting us up on pedestals for a little thing like that."
+
+The fat girl was smiling. "Make it singular, mother. I have no quarrel
+with a pedestal for you, though it might be a little awkward to move
+about on."
+
+Mrs. Gordon shook again with that fascinating laughter. "Mercy me! I'd
+tip off first thing and then where would we all be?"
+
+Elliott's eyes sought Harriet Gordon's. If she had observed closely
+she would have seen spots on the white dress, but to-night she was not
+looking at clothes. She only thought what a kind face the big girl had
+and how extraordinarily pleasant her voice was and what good friends
+she and her mother were, just like Laura and Aunt Jessica, only
+different.
+
+"There!" said Mrs. Gordon. "You drank up every drop, didn't you? You
+must have been hungry. Now you go right to sleep again and I'll miss
+my guess if you don't feel real good in the morning."
+
+"Good night," said Harriet from the door. "Did you give Blink her
+good-night mouthful, Mother?"
+
+"No, I didn't. How I do forget that cat!" said Mrs. Gordon. She turned
+down the sheet under Elliott's chin, patted it a little, and asked,
+"Don't you want your pillow turned over?" Then quite naturally she
+stooped down and kissed the girl. "I guess you're all right now. Good
+night." And Elliott put both arms around her neck and hugged her, big
+as she was. "Good night," she said softly.
+
+The next time Elliott woke up it was broad daylight. Her eyes opened
+on a framed motto, "God is Love," and she had to lie still and think a
+full minute before she could remember where she was and why she was
+there at all. Then she smiled at the motto--it wasn't the kind of
+thing she liked on walls, but to see it there did not make her feel in
+the least superior this morning--and jumped out of bed. As Mrs. Gordon
+had prophesied, she felt well, only the least bit wabbly. Probably
+that was because it was before breakfast--her breakfast. She had a
+disconcerting fear that it might be long long after other people's
+breakfasts and for the first time in her life she was distressed at
+making trouble. Hitherto it had seemed right and normal for people to
+put themselves out for her.
+
+She dressed as quickly as she could and went down-stairs. Harriet was
+shelling peas on the big veranda that looked off across the valley to
+the mountains. There must have been rain in the night, for the world
+was bathed clean and shining.
+
+"Mother said to let you sleep as long as you would." Harriet stopped
+the current of apology on Elliott's lips. "Did you have a good
+night?"
+
+"Splendid! I didn't know a thing from the time your mother went out of
+the room until half an hour ago."
+
+"Didn't know anything about the thunder-shower?"
+
+"Was there a thunder-shower?"
+
+"A big one. It put our telephone out of commission."
+
+"I didn't hear it," said Elliott.
+
+"It almost pays to be sick, to find out how good it feels to be well,
+doesn't it? Here's a glass of milk. Drink that while I get your
+breakfast."
+
+"Can't I do it? I hate to make you more trouble."
+
+"Trouble? Forget that word! We like to have you here. It is good for
+Mother. Gives her something to think about. Can't you spend the day?"
+
+Now, Elliott wanted to get home at once; she had been longing ever
+since she woke up to see Mother Jess and Laura and Father Bob and
+Henry and Bruce and everybody else on the Cameron farm, not omitting
+Prince and the chickens and the "black and whitey" calf; but she
+thought rapidly: if it really made things any easier for the Gordons
+to have her here--
+
+"Why, yes, I can stay if you want me to." It cost her something to say
+those words, but she said them with a smile.
+
+"Good! I'll telephone Mrs. Cameron that we will bring you home this
+afternoon. I'll go over to the Blisses' to do it, though maybe their
+telephone's knocked out, too. The one at our hired man's house isn't
+working. Here comes Mother with an egg the hen has just laid for your
+breakfast." "Just a-purpose," said Mrs. Gordon. "It's warm yet and
+marked 'Elliott Cameron' plain as daylight. Is my hair full of straw,
+Harriet?"
+
+"It is, straw and cobwebs. Where have you been, Mother? You know you
+haven't any business in the haymow or crawling under the old carryall.
+Why don't you let Alma bring in the eggs? She's little and spry."
+
+"Pooh!" said Mrs. Gordon, with one of her silent laughs. "Pooh, pooh!
+Alma isn't any match for old Whitefoot yet. You'd think that hen laid
+awake nights thinking up outlandish places to lay her eggs in. Wait
+till you get to be sixty, Harriet. Then you'll know you can't let
+folks wait on you. Before that it's all right, but after sixty you've
+got to do for yourself, if you don't want to grow old.--Two, dearie?
+I'm going to make you a drop-egg on toast for your breakfast."
+
+"Oh, no, one!" cried Elliott. "I never eat two. And can't I help? I
+hate to have you get my breakfast."
+
+"Why, yes, you can dish up your oatmeal," calmly cracking a second
+egg. "'T won't do a mite of harm to have two. Maybe you're hungrier
+than you think. Now Harriet, the water, and we're all ready. I'll help
+you finish those peas while she eats."
+
+The woman and the girl shelled peas, their fat fingers fairly flying
+through the pods, while Elliott devoured both eggs and a bowl of
+oatmeal and a pitcher of cream and a dish of blueberries and wondered
+how they could make their fingers move so fast.
+
+"Practice," said Mrs. Gordon in answer to the girl's query. "You do a
+thing over and over enough times and you get so you can't help doing
+it fast, if you've got any gumption at all. The quarts of peas I've
+shelled in my life time would feed an army, I guess."
+
+"Don't you ever get tired?"
+
+"Tired of shelling peas? Land no, I like it! I can sit in here and
+look at you, or out on the back piazza and watch the mountains, or on
+the front step and see folks drive by, and I've always got my
+thoughts." A shadow crossed the placid face. "My thoughts work better
+when my fingers are busy. I'd hate to just sit and hold my hands. Ted
+dared me once to try it for an hour. That was the longest hour I ever
+spent."
+
+Mrs. Gordon had risen to peer through the window after a rapidly
+receding wagon.
+
+"There!" she said. "There goes that woman from Bayfield I want to sell
+some of my bees to. She's going down to Blisses' and I'd better walk
+right over and talk to her, as the telephone won't work. I 'most think
+one hive is going to swarm this morning, but I guess I'll have time to
+get back before they come out. Hello, Johnny, how do you do to-day?"
+
+"All right," lisped the small solemn-eyed urchin who had strayed in
+from the kitchen and now stood in the door hitching at a diminutive
+pair of trousers and eying Elliott absorbedly. "Gone!" he announced
+suddenly; coming out of his scrutiny.
+
+"What, your button?" Harriet pulled him up to her. "I'll sew it on in
+a jiffy. Don't worry about the bees, Mother. I can manage them, if
+they decide to swarm before you get back, and while you're at the
+Blisses' just telephone central our phone's out of order--and oh,
+please tell Mrs. Cameron we're keeping Elliott till afternoon."
+
+Mrs. Gordon departed and Harriet sewed on the button. "There, Johnny,
+now you're all right. You can run out and play."
+
+But Johnny became suddenly galvanized into action. He dived into a
+small pocket and produced a note, crumpled and soiled, but still
+legible.
+
+"If that isn't provoking!" said Harriet, when she had read it. "Why
+didn't you give me this the first thing, Johnny? Then Mother could
+have done this telephoning, too, at the Blisses'."
+
+"What is it?" asked Elliott.
+
+"A message Johnny's mother wants sent. She's our hired man's wife and
+I must say at times she shows about as much brains as a chicken. You'd
+think she'd know our 'phone wouldn't be likely to work, if hers
+didn't. Now I shall have to go over to the Blisses' myself, I suppose.
+The message seems fairly important. Where has your mother gone,
+Johnny?"
+
+But Johnny didn't know; beyond a vague "she wided away" he was
+non-committal.
+
+"She might have stopped somewhere and telephoned for herself, I should
+think," grumbled Harriet. "I'll be back in a few minutes. Or will you
+come, too? If I can't 'phone from the Blisses' I may have to go
+farther."
+
+"I'll stay here, I think, and wash up my dishes. And after that I'll
+finish the peas."
+
+"Mercy me, I shan't be gone that long! We're shelling these to put up,
+you know. Don't bother about washing your dishes, either. They'll
+keep."
+
+"Who's saying bother, now?" Elliott's dimples twinkled mischievously.
+
+Harriet laughed. "You and Johnny can mind the place. The men and Alma
+are all off at the lower farm and here goes the last woman. Good-by."
+
+Elliott went briskly about her program. She found soap and a pan and
+rinsed her dishes under the hot-water faucet. Then she sat down to the
+peas. Johnny, who had followed her about for a while, deserted her for
+pressing affairs of his own out-of-doors. Elliott pinched the pods as
+scientifically as she knew how and wondered whether, if she should
+shell peas all her life, her slender fingers would ever acquire the
+lightning nimbleness of the Gordons' fat ones. How long Harriet was
+gone!
+
+She was thinking about this when she heard something that made her
+first stop her work to listen and then jump up hurriedly, spilling the
+peas out of her lap. The wailing of a terrified child was coming
+nearer and nearer. Elliott set down the peas that were left and ran
+out on the veranda. There was Johnny stumbling up the path, crying at
+the top of his lungs.
+
+"Why, Johnny!" She ran toward him. "Why, Johnny, what is the matter?"
+
+Johnny precipitated himself into her arms in a torrent of tears. Not a
+word was distinguishable, but his wails pierced the girl's ear-drums.
+
+"Johnny! Johnny, _stop it_! Tell me where you're hurt."
+
+But Johnny only sobbed the harder. He couldn't be in danger of
+death--could he?--when he screamed so. That showed his lungs were all
+right, and his legs worked, too, and his arms. They were digging into
+her now, with a force that almost upset her equilibrium. Could
+something be wrong inside of him?
+
+"What's the matter, Johnny? Stop crying and tell me."
+
+Johnny's yells slackened for want of breath. He held up one brown
+little hand. She inspected it. Dirty, of course, unspeakably, but
+otherwise--Oh, there was a bunch on one knuckle, a bunch that was
+swelling. "Is that where it hurts you, Johnny?"
+
+Johnny nodded, gulping.
+
+"Did something sting you?"
+
+"Bee stung Johnny. _Naughty_ bee!"
+
+The girl stared at the small grimy hand in consternation. A bee sting!
+What did you do for a bee sting or any kind of a sting for that
+matter? Mosquitoes--hamamelis. And where did the Gordons keep their
+hamamelis bottle?
+
+Johnny's screams, abated in expectation of relief, began to rise once
+more. He was angry. Why didn't she _do_ something? This delay was
+unendurable. His voice mounted in a long, piercing wail.
+
+"Don't cry," the girl said nervously. "Don't cry. Let's go into the
+house and find something."
+
+Up-stairs and down she trailed the shrieking child. At the Cameron
+farm there were two hamamelis bottles, one in the bath-room, the other
+on a shelf in the kitchen. But nothing rewarded her search here. If
+only some one were at home! If only the telephone weren't out of
+order! Desperately she took down the receiver, to be greeted by a
+faint, continuous buzzing. There was nothing for it; she must leave
+Johnny and run to a neighbor's. But Johnny refused to be left. He
+clung to her and kicked and screamed for pain and the terror of
+finding his secure baby world falling to pieces about his ears.
+
+"It's a shame, Johnny. I ought to know what to do, but I don't. You
+come too, then."
+
+But Johnny refused to budge. He threw himself on his back on the veranda
+and beat the floor with his heels and wailed long heart-piercing wails
+that trembled into sobbing silence, only to begin all over with fresh
+vigor. Elliott was at her wits' end. She didn't dare go away and leave
+him; she was afraid he might kill himself crying. But mightn't he do
+so if she stayed? He pushed her away when she tried to comfort him.
+There was only one thing that he wanted; he would have none of her, if
+she didn't give it to him.
+
+Never in her life had Elliott Cameron felt so insignificant, so
+helpless and futile, as she did at that minute. "Oh, you poor baby!"
+she cried, and hated herself for her ignorance. Laura would have known
+what to do; Harriet Gordon would have known. Would nobody ever come?
+
+"What's the matter with him?" The question barked out, brusque and
+sharp, but never had a voice sounded more welcome in Elliott Cameron's
+ears. She turned around in joyful relief to encounter a pair of
+gimlet-like black eyes in the face of an old woman. She was an ugly
+little old woman in a battered straw hat and a shabby old jacket,
+though the day was warm, and a faded print skirt that was draggled
+with mud at the hem. Her hair strayed untidily about her face and
+unfathomable scorn looked out of her snapping black eyes.
+
+"It's a--a bee sting," stammered the girl, shrinking under the scorn.
+
+"Hee-hee-hee!" The old woman's laughter was cracked and high. "What
+kind of a lummux are you? Don't know what to do for a bee sting!
+Hee-hee! Mud, you gawk you, mud!"
+
+She bent down and slapped up a handful of wet soil from the edge of
+the fern bed below the veranda. "Put that on him," she said and went
+away giggling a girl's shrill giggle and muttering between her
+giggles: "Don't know what to do for a bee sting. Hee-hee!"
+
+For a whole minute after the queer old woman had gone Elliott stood
+there, staring down at the spatter of mud on the steps, dismay and
+wrath in her heart. Then, because she didn't know anything else to do
+and because Johnny's screams had redoubled, she stooped, and with
+gingerly care picked up the lump of black mud and went over to the
+boy. Mud couldn't hurt him, she thought, put on outside; it certainly
+couldn't hurt him, but could it help?
+
+She sat down on the floor and lifted the little swollen fist and held
+the cool mud on it, neither noticing nor caring that some trickled
+down on her own skirt. She sat there a long time, or so it seemed,
+while Johnny's yells sank to long-drawn sobs and then ceased
+altogether as he snuggled forgivingly against her arm. And in her
+heart was a great shame and an aching feeling of inadequacy and
+failure. Elliott Cameron had never known so bitter a five minutes. All
+her pride and self-sufficiency were gone. What was she good for in a
+practical emergency? Just nothing at all. She didn't know even the
+commonest things, not the commonest.
+
+"It must have been Witless Sue," said Aunt Jessica, late that
+afternoon, when Elliott told her the story. "She is a half-witted old
+soul who wanders about digging herbs in summer and lives on the town
+farm in winter. There's no harm in her."
+
+"Half-witted!" said Elliott. "She knew more than I did."
+
+"You have not had the opportunity to learn."
+
+"That didn't make it any better for Johnny. Laura knows all those
+things, doesn't she? And Trudy, too?"
+
+"I think they know what to do in the simpler emergencies of life."
+
+"I wish I did. I took a first-aid course, but it didn't have stings in
+it, not as far as we'd gone when I came away. We were taught bandaging
+and using splints and things like that."
+
+"Very useful knowledge."
+
+"But Johnny got stung," said Elliott, as though nothing mattered
+beyond that fact. "Do you think you could teach me things, now and
+then, Aunt Jessica? the things Laura and Trudy know?"
+
+"Surely," said Aunt Jessica, "and very gladly. There are things that
+you could teach Laura and Trudy, too. Don't forget that entirely."
+
+"Could I? Useful things?" She asked the question with humility.
+
+"Very useful things in certain kinds of emergency. What did Mrs.
+Gordon do for Johnny when she got home?"
+
+"Oh, she washed his hand and soaked it in strong soda and water,
+baking-soda, and then she bound some soda right on, for good measure,
+she said."
+
+"There!" said Aunt Jessica. "Now you know two things to do for a bee
+sting."
+
+Elliott opened her eyes wide. "Why, so I do, don't I? I truly do."
+
+"That's the way people learn," said Mother Jess, "by emergencies. It
+is the only way they are sure to remember. Laura is helping Henry
+milk. Suppose you make us some biscuit for supper, Elliott."
+
+Elliott started to say, "I've never made biscuit," but shut her lips
+tight before the words slipped out.
+
+"I will tell you the rule. You'd better double it for our family.
+Everything is plainly marked in the pantry. Perhaps the fire needs
+another stick before you begin."
+
+Carefully the girl selected a stick from the wood-box. "Just let me
+get my apron, Aunt Jessica," she said.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+ELLIOTT ACTS ON AN IDEA
+
+
+Six weeks later a girl was busy in the sunny white kitchen of the
+Cameron farm. The girl wore a big blue apron that covered her gown
+completely from neck to hem, and she hummed a little song as she moved
+from sink to range and range to table. There was about her a delicate
+air of importance, almost of elation. You know as well as I where
+Elliott Cameron ought to have been by this time. Six weeks plus how
+many other weeks was it since she left home? The quarantine must have
+been lifted from her Uncle James's house for at least a month. But the
+girl in the kitchen looked surprisingly like Elliott Cameron. If it
+wasn't she, it must have been her twin, and I have never heard that
+Elliott had a twin.
+
+Though she was all alone in the kitchen--washing potatoes, too--she
+didn't appear in the least unhappy. She went over to the stove, lifted
+a lid, glanced in, and added two or three sticks of wood to the fire.
+Then she brought out a pan of apples and went down cellar after a roll
+of pie crust. Some one else may have made that pie crust. Elliott took
+it into the pantry, turned the board on the flour barrel, shook flour
+evenly over it from the sifter, and, cutting off one end of the pie
+crust, began to roll it out thin on the board. She arranged the lower
+crust on three pie-plates, and, going into the kitchen again, began to
+peel the apples and cut them up into the pies. Perhaps she wasn't so
+quick about it as Laura might have been, but she did very well. The
+skin fell from her knife in long, thin, curly strips. After that she
+finished the pies off in the pantry and tucked all three into the
+oven. Squatting on her feet in front of the door, she studied the dial
+intently for a moment and hesitatingly pushed the draft just a crack
+open. If it hadn't been for that momentary indecision, you might have
+thought that she had been baking pies all her life. Then she began to
+peel the potatoes.
+
+[Illustration: "I'm getting dinner all by myself"]
+
+So it was that Stannard found her. "Hello!" he said, with a grin.
+"Busy?"
+
+"Indeed, I am! I'm getting dinner all by myself."
+
+He went through a pantomime of dodging a blow. "Whew-ee! Guess I'll
+take to the woods."
+
+"Better not. If you do, you will miss a good dinner. Mother Jess said
+I might try it. Boiled potatoes and baked fish--she showed me how to
+fix that--and corn and things. There's one other dish on my menu that
+I'm not going to tell you." And all her dimples came into play.
+
+"H'm!" said Stannard, "we feel pretty smart, don't we? Well, maybe
+I'll stay and see how it pans out. A fellow can always tighten his
+belt, you know."
+
+"Aren't you horrid!" She made up a face at him, a captivating little
+grimace that wrinkled her nose and set imps of mischief dancing in her
+eyes.
+
+Stannard watched her as with firm motions she stripped the husks from
+the corn, picking off the clinging strands of silk daintily.
+
+"Gee, Elliott!" he exclaimed. "Do you know, you're prettier than
+ever!"
+
+She dropped him a courtesy. "I must be, with a smooch of flour on my
+nose and my hair every which way."
+
+He grinned. "That's a story. Your hair looks as though Madame
+What-'s-her-name, that you and Mater and the girls go to so much, had
+just got through with you. I've never seen you when you didn't look as
+though you had come out of a bandbox."
+
+"Haven't you? Think again, Stan, think again! What about your Cousin
+Elliott in a corn-field?"
+
+Stannard slapped his thigh. "That's so, too! I forgot that. But your
+hair's all to the good, even then."
+
+"Stan," warned Elliott, "you'd better be careful. You will get in too
+deep to wade out, if you don't watch your step. What are you getting
+at, anyway? Why all these compliments?"
+
+"Compliments! A fellow doesn't have to praise up his cousin, does he?
+It just struck me, all of a sudden, that you look pretty fit."
+
+"Thanks. I'm feeling as fit as I look. Out with it, Stan; what do you
+want?"
+
+"Why, nothing," said Stannard, "nothing at all. Shall I take out those
+husks, Lot?"
+
+"Delighted. The pigs eat 'em." Her eyes held a quizzical light. "If
+you're trying to rattle me so I shall forget something and spoil my
+dinner, you can't do it."
+
+"What do you take me for?" He departed with the husks, deeply
+indignant.
+
+In five minutes he was back. "When are you going home?"
+
+"I don't know. Not just yet. Your mother has too many house parties."
+
+"That won't make any difference."
+
+"Oh, yes, it does! Her house is full all the time."
+
+"Shucks! Have you asked her if there's a room ready for you?"
+
+"Indeed I haven't! I wouldn't think of imposing on a busy hostess."
+
+"I might say something about it," he suggested slyly.
+
+"You will do nothing of the kind."
+
+"Oh, I don't know! I'm going home myself day after to-morrow."
+
+Hastily Elliott set down the kettle she had lifted. "Are you? That's
+nice. I mean, we shall miss you, but of course you have to go some
+time, I suppose."
+
+"It won't be any trouble at all to speak to Mother."
+
+"Stannard," and the color burned in her cheeks, "will you _please_
+stop fiddling around this kitchen? It makes me nervous to see you. I
+nearly burned myself in the steam of that kettle and I'm liable to
+drop something on you any time."
+
+"Oh, all right! I'll get out. Fiddling is a new verb with you, isn't
+it?"
+
+"Yes, I picked it up. Very expressive, I think."
+
+"Sounds like the natives."
+
+"Sounds pretty well, then. Did I hear you say you had an errand
+somewhere?"
+
+"No, you didn't. You merely heard me say that finding myself _de trop_
+in my fair cousin's company, I'd get out of range of her big guns.
+Never expected to rattle you, Lot."
+
+"I'm not rattled."
+
+"No? Pretty good imitation, then. Oh, I'm going! Mother's ready for
+you all right, though; says so in this letter. Here, I'll stick it in
+your apron pocket. Better come along with me, day after to-morrow.
+What say?"
+
+"I'll see," said Elliott, briefly.
+
+He grinned teasingly, "Ta-ta," and went off, leaving turmoil behind
+him.
+
+The minute Stannard was out of the door Elliott did a strange thing.
+Reaching with wet pink thumb and forefinger into the depths of the
+blue apron pocket, she extracted the letter and hurled it across the
+kitchen into a corner.
+
+"There!" she cried disdainfully, "you go over there and _stay_ a
+while, horrid old letter! I'm not going to let you spoil my perfectly
+good time getting dinner."
+
+But it was spoiled: no mere words could alter the fact. Try as she
+would to put the letter out of her mind and think only of how to do a
+dozen things at once one quarter as quickly and skilfully as Laura and
+Aunt Jessica did them, which is what the apparently simple process of
+dishing up a dinner means, the fine thrill of the enterprise was gone.
+Laura came in to help her and Elliott's tongue tripped briskly through
+a deal of chatter, but all the while underneath there was a little
+undercurrent of uneasiness and anxiety. Wouldn't you have thought it
+would delight her to have the opportunity of doing what she had so
+much wished to do?
+
+"What's this?" Laura asked, spying the white envelop on the floor; "a
+letter?"
+
+"Oh, yes," said Elliott, "one I dropped," and she tucked it into the
+pocket of the white skirt that had been all the time under the blue
+apron, giving it a vindictive little slap as she did so. Which, of
+course, was quite uncalled for, as if any one was responsible for what
+was in the letter, that person was Elliott Cameron. The fact that she
+knew this very well only added a little extra vigor to the slap.
+
+And all through dinner she sat and laughed and chattered away, exactly
+as though she weren't conscious in every nerve of the letter in her
+pocket, despite the fact that she didn't know a word it said. But she
+didn't eat much: the taste of food seemed to choke her. Her gaze
+wandered from Mother Jess to Father Bob and back, around the circle of
+eager, happy, alert faces. And she felt--poor Elliott!--as though her
+first discontent were a boomerang now returned to stab her.
+
+"This is Elliott's dinner, I would have you all know," announced Laura
+when the pie was served. "She did it all herself."
+
+"Not every bit," said Elliott, honestly; but her disclaimer was lost
+in the chorus of praise.
+
+Father Bob laid down his fork, looking pleased. "Did you, indeed? Now,
+this is what I call a well-cooked dinner."
+
+"I'll give you a recommend for a cook," drawled Stannard, "and eat my
+words about tightening my belt, too."
+
+"Some dinner!" Bruce commented.
+
+"Please, I'd like another piece," said Priscilla.
+
+"Me, too," chimed in Tom. "It's corking."
+
+Laura clapped her hands. "Listen, Elliott, listen! Could praise go
+further?"
+
+But Mother Jess, when they rose from the table, slipped an arm through
+Elliott's and drew her toward the veranda. "Did the cook lose her
+appetite getting dinner, little girl?"
+
+"Oh, no, indeed, Aunt Jessica! Getting dinner didn't tire me a bit. I
+just loved it. I--I didn't seem to feel hungry this noon, that was
+all."
+
+Mother Jess patted her arm. "Well, run away now, dear. You are not to
+give a thought to the dishes. We will see to them."
+
+At that minute Elliott almost told her about the letter in her pocket,
+that lay like a lump of lead on her heart. But Henry appeared just
+then in the doorway and the moment passed.
+
+"Run away, dear," repeated Aunt Jessica, and gave the girl a little
+push and another little pat. "Run away and get rested."
+
+Slowly Elliott went down the steps and along the path that led to the
+flower borders and the apple trees. She wasn't really conscious of the
+way she was going; her feet took charge of her and carried her body
+along while her mind was busy. When she came out among a few big trees
+with a welter of piled-up crests on every side, she was really
+astonished.
+
+"Why!" she cried; "why, here I am on the top of the hill!"
+
+A low, flat rock invited her and she sat down. It was queer how
+different everything seemed up here. What looked large from below had
+dwindled amazingly. It took, she decided, a pretty big thing to look
+big on a hilltop.
+
+She drew Aunt Margaret's letter out of her pocket and read it. It was
+very nice, but somehow had no tug to it. Phrases from a similar letter
+of Aunt Jessica's returned to the girl's mind. How stupid she had been
+not to appreciate that letter!--stupid and incredibly silly.
+
+But hadn't she felt something else in her pocket just now? Conscience
+pricked when she saw Elizabeth Royce's handwriting. The seal had not
+been broken, though the letter had come yesterday. She remembered now.
+They were putting up corn and she had tucked it into her pocket for
+later reading and then had forgotten it completely. Luckily, Bess need
+never know that. But what would Bess have said to see her friend
+Elliott, corn to the right of her, corn to the left of her, cobs piled
+high in the summer kitchen?
+
+Bess's staccato sentences furnished a sufficiently emphatic clue. "You
+poor, abused dear! Whenever are you coming home? If I had an aeroplane
+I'd fly up and carry you off. You must be nearly _crazy_! Those
+letters you wrote were the most TRAGIC things! I shouldn't have been a
+bit surprised any time to hear you were sick. _Are_ you sick? Perhaps
+that's why you don't write or come home. Wire me _the minute you get
+this_. Oh, Elliott darling, when I think of you marooned in that awful
+place--"
+
+There was more of it. As Elliott read, she did a strange thing. She
+began to laugh. But even while she laughed she blushed, too. _Had_ she
+sounded as desperate as all that? How far away such tragedies seemed
+now! Suppose she should write, "Dear Bess, I like it up here and I am
+going to stay my year out." Bess would think her crazy; so would all
+the girls, and Aunt Margaret, too.
+
+And then suddenly an arresting idea came into her head. What
+difference would it make if they did think her crazy? Elliott Cameron
+had never had such an idea before; all her life she had in a perfectly
+nice way thought a great deal about what people thought of her. This
+idea was so strange it set her gasping. "But how they would _talk_
+about me!" she said. And then her brain clicked back, exactly like
+another person speaking, "What if they did? That wouldn't really make
+you crazy, would it?" "Why, no, I suppose it wouldn't," she thought.
+"And most likely they'd be all talked out by the time I got back, too.
+But even if they weren't, any one would be crazy to think it was crazy
+to want to stay up here at Uncle Bob's and Aunt Jessica's. Even
+Stannard has stayed weeks longer than he needed to!"
+
+When she thought of that she opened her eyes wide for a minute. "Oho!"
+she said to herself; "I guess Stan did get a rise out of me! You were
+easy game that time, Elliott Cameron."
+
+She sat on her mossy stone a long time. There wasn't anything in the
+world, was there, to stand in the way of her staying her year out, the
+year she had been invited for, except her own silly pride? What a
+little goose she had been! She sat and smiled at the mountains and
+felt very happy and fresh and clean-minded, as though her brain had
+finished a kind of house-cleaning and were now put to rights again,
+airy and sweet and ready for use.
+
+The postman's wagon flashed by on the road below. She could see the
+faded gray of the man's coat. He had been to the house and was
+townward bound now. How late he was! Nothing to hurry down for. There
+would be a letter, perhaps, but not one from Father. His had come
+yesterday. She rose after a while and drifted down through the still
+September warmth, as quiet and lazy and contented as a leaf.
+
+Priscilla's small excited face met her at the door.
+
+"Sidney's sick; we just got the letter. Mother's going to camp
+to-morrow."
+
+"Sidney sick! Who wrote? What's the matter?"
+
+"He did. He's not much sick, but he doesn't feel just right. He's in
+the hospital. I guess he can't be much sick, if he wrote, himself.
+Mother wasn't to come, he said, but she's going."
+
+"Of course." Nervous fear clutched Elliott's throat, like an icy hand.
+Oh, poor Aunt Jessica! Poor Laura!
+
+"Where are they?" she asked.
+
+"In Mumsie's room," said Priscilla. "We're all helping."
+
+Elliott mounted the stairs. She had to force her feet along, for they
+wished, more than anything else, to run away. What should she say? She
+tried to think of words. As it turned out, she didn't have to say
+anything.
+
+Laura was the only person in Aunt Jessica's room when they reached it.
+She sat in a low chair by a window, mending a gray blouse.
+
+"Elliott's come to help, too," announced Priscilla.
+
+"That's good," said Laura. "You can put a fresh collar and cuffs in
+this gray waist of Mother's, Elliott--I'll have it done in a
+minute--while I go set the crab-apple jelly to drip. And perhaps you
+can mend this little tear in her skirt. Then I'll press the suit.
+There isn't anything very tremendous to do."
+
+It was all so matter-of-fact and quiet and natural that Elliott didn't
+know what to make of it. She managed to gasp, "I hope Sidney isn't
+very sick."
+
+"He thinks not," said Laura, "but of course Mother wants to see for
+herself. She is telephoning Mrs. Blair now about the Ladies' Aid. They
+were to have met here this week. Mother thinks perhaps she can arrange
+an exchange of dates, though I tell her if Sid's as he says he is,
+they might just as well come."
+
+Elliott, who had been all ready to put her arms around Laura's neck
+and kiss and comfort her, felt the least little bit taken aback. It
+seemed that no comfort was needed. But it was a relief, too. Laura
+_couldn't_ sit there, so cool and calm and natural-looking, sewing and
+talking about crab-apple juice and Ladies' Aid, if there were anything
+radically wrong.
+
+Then Aunt Jessica came into the room and said that Mrs. Blair would
+like the Ladies' Aid, herself, that week; she had been wishing she
+could have them; and didn't Elliott feel the need of something to eat
+to supplement her scanty dinner?
+
+That put to rout the girl's last fears. She smiled quite naturally and
+said without any stricture in her throat: "Honestly, I'm not hungry.
+And I am going to put a clean collar in your blouse."
+
+"What should I do without my girls!" smiled Mother Jess.
+
+It was after supper that the telegram came, but even then there was no
+panic. These Camerons didn't do any of the things Elliott had once or
+twice seen people do in her Aunt Margaret's household. No one ran
+around futilely, doing nothing; no one had hysterics; no one even
+cried.
+
+Mother Jess's face went very white when Father Bob came back from the
+telephone and said, "Sidney isn't so well."
+
+"Have they sent for us?"
+
+He nodded. "You'd better take the sleeper. The eighty-thirty from
+Upton will make it."
+
+"Can you--?"
+
+"Not with things the way they are here."
+
+Then they all scattered, to do the things that had to be done. Elliott
+was helping Laura pack the suit-case when she had her idea. It really
+was a wonderful idea for a girl who had never in her life put herself
+out for any one else. Like a flash the first part of it came to her,
+without thought of a sequel; and the words were out of her mouth
+almost before she was aware she had thought them.
+
+"You ought to go, Laura!" she cried. "Sidney is your twin."
+
+"I'd like to go." Something in the guarded tone, something deep and
+intense and controlled, struck Elliott to consternation. If Laura felt
+that way about it!
+
+"Why don't you, Laura? Can't you possibly?"
+
+The other shook her head. "Mother is the one to go. If we both went,
+who would keep house here?"
+
+For a fraction of a second Elliott hesitated. "_I_ would."
+
+The words once spoken, fairly swept her out of herself. All her little
+prudences and selfishnesses and self-distrusts went overboard
+together. Her cheeks flamed. She dropped the brush and comb she was
+packing and dashed out of the room.
+
+A group of people stood in the kitchen. Without stopping to think,
+Elliott ran up to them.
+
+"Can't Laura go?" she cried eagerly. "It will be so much more
+comfortable to be two than one. And she is Sidney's twin. I don't know
+a great deal, but people will help me, and I got dinner this noon. Oh,
+she must go! Don't you see that she must go?"
+
+Father Bob looked at the girl for a minute in silence. Then he spoke:
+"Well, I guess you're right. I will look after the chickens."
+
+"I'll mix their feed," said Gertrude; "I know just how Laura does
+it--and I'll do the dishes."
+
+"I'll get breakfasts," said Bruce.
+
+"I'll make the butter," said Tom. "I've watched Mother times enough.
+And helped her, too."
+
+"I'll see to Prince and the kitty," chimed in Priscilla, "and do, oh,
+lots of things!"
+
+"I'll be responsible for the milk," said Henry.
+
+"I'll keep house," said Elliott, "if you leave me anything to do."
+
+"And I'll help you," said Harriet Gordon.
+
+It was really settled in that minute, though Father Bob and Mother
+Jess talked it over again by themselves.
+
+"Are you sure, dear, you want to do this?" Mother Jess asked Elliott.
+
+"Perfectly sure," the girl answered. She felt excited and confident,
+as though she could do anything.
+
+"It won't be easy."
+
+"I know that. But please let me try."
+
+"And there are the Gordons," said Mother Jess, half to herself.
+
+"Yes," echoed Elliott, "there are the Gordons."
+
+When the little car ran up to the door to take the two over to Upton
+and Mother Jess and Laura were saying good-by, Laura strained Elliott
+tight. "I'll love you forever for this," she whispered.
+
+Then they were off and with them seemed to have gone something
+indispensable to the well-being of the people who lived in the white
+house at the end of the road. Elliott, watching the car vanish around
+a turn in the road, hugged Laura's words tight to her heart. It was
+the only way to keep her knees from wabbling at the thought of what
+was before her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+WHAT'S IN A DRESS?
+
+
+Of course Elliott never could have done it without the Gordons.
+Elliott and Harriet made the crab-apple juice into jelly, Mrs. Gordon
+sent in bread and cookies, and both mother and daughter stood behind
+the girl with their skill and experience, ready to be called on at a
+moment's notice.
+
+"Just send for us any time you get into trouble or want help about
+something," said Mrs. Gordon over the telephone. "One of us will come
+right up. Most likely it will be Harriet. I'm so cumbersome, I can't
+get about as I'd like to. Large bodies move slowly, you know."
+
+Other people besides the Gordons sent in things to eat. Elliott
+thought she had never known such a stream of generosity as set toward
+the white house at the end of the road--intelligent generosity, too.
+There seemed a definite plan and some consultation behind it. Mr.
+Blair brought a roast of beef already cooked, from Mrs. Blair, and
+hoped for both of them that there would soon be good news of the boy.
+The Blisses sent in pies enough for two days and asked Elliott to let
+them know when she was ready for more. People she knew and people she
+didn't know brought rolls and cookies and doughnuts and gelatines and
+even roast chickens, and asked, with real anxiety in their voices, for
+the latest news from Camp Devens.
+
+They didn't bring their offerings all at once; they brought them
+continuously and steadily and with truly remarkable appropriateness.
+Just when Elliott was thinking that she must begin to cook, something
+was sure to rattle up to the door in a wagon, or roll up in an
+automobile, or travel on foot in a basket. It was the extreme
+timeliness of the gifts that proved the guiding intelligence behind
+them.
+
+"They couldn't all happen so," was Henry's conclusion. "Now, could
+they? Gee! and I've thought some of those folks were pokes!"
+
+"So have I," said Elliott, feeling very much ashamed of her hasty
+judgments.
+
+"You never know till you get into trouble how good people are," was
+Father Bob's verdict.
+
+Gertrude fingered a doughnut ruefully. "I want it, but I'm almost
+ashamed to eat it. I've thought such horrid things of that old Mrs.
+Gadsby that made 'em."
+
+"They're good," said Tom. "Mrs. Gadsby knows how to make doughnuts, if
+she _has_ got a tongue in her head! Say, but I'd as soon have thought
+old Allen would send us doughnuts as the Gadsby."
+
+"Mr. Allen brought us a tongue this morning," Elliott remarked; "said
+his housekeeper boiled it; hoped it wasn't too tough to eat. You
+couldn't 'git nothin' good, these days!'"
+
+"_Enoch_ Allen?" demanded Henry; "the old fellow that lives at the
+foot of the hill? Go tell that to the marines!"
+
+"I don't know where he lives," said Elliott, "but he certainly said
+his name was Enoch Allen."
+
+Bruce chuckled. "Mother Jess's chickens have come home to roost, all
+right."
+
+"What did she ever do for Enoch Allen?" asked Tom.
+
+"Oh, don't you remember," cried Gertrude, "the time his old dog died?
+Mother found the dog one day, dying in the woods. I was along and she
+sent me to call Mr. Allen, while she stayed with the dog. I was just a
+little girl and kind of scared, but Mother said Mr. Allen wasn't
+anybody to be afraid of; he was just a lonely old man. I heard him
+tell her it wasn't every woman would have stayed with his dog. It was
+dead when he got there."
+
+But even with competent advisers within call and all the aids that
+came in the shape of "Mother Jess's chickens," and with the best
+family in the world all eagerness to be helpful and to "carry
+on" during Laura and Mother Jess's absence, Elliott found that
+housekeeping wasn't half so simple as it looked.
+
+Life still had its moments and she was in the midst of one of the
+worst of them now. If you have ever stood in a kitchen where little
+gray kittens of dust rollicked under the chairs and all the dinner
+kettles and pans were piled on the table, unscraped and unwashed, and
+you saw ahead of you more things that you had planned to do than you
+could possibly get through before supper, and one girl was crying in
+the attic and another was crying in the china-closet, and your own
+heart was in your boots, you know how Elliott Cameron felt at this
+minute. Everything had gone wrong, since the time she got up half an
+hour late in the morning; but the most wrong thing of all was the
+letter from Laura.
+
+It had come just as they were finishing dinner, for the postman was
+late. Father Bob had cut it open, while every one looked eager and
+hopeful. Mother Jess had written the day before that the doctors
+thought Sidney was better; there had been a telegram to that effect,
+too. Father Bob read Laura's letter quite through before he opened his
+lips. It wasn't a long letter. Then he said: "The boy's not so well,
+to-day.--Bruce, we must finish the ensilage. Come out as soon as
+you're through, boys. Tom, I want you to get in the tomatoes before
+night. We're due for a freeze, unless signs fail." Not another word
+about Sidney. And he went right out of the room.
+
+"What does she say?" whispered Gertrude, dropping her fork so that
+it rattled against her plate. Gertrude was always dropping things,
+but this time she didn't flush, as she usually did, at her own
+awkwardness.
+
+Elliott picked up the letter Father Bob had left beside her plate. She
+dreaded to unfold the single sheet, but what else could she do, with
+all those pairs of anxious eyes fixed on her? She steadied her voice
+and read slowly and without a trace of expression:
+
+  "Sidney had a bad time in the night, but is resting more easily
+  this morning. Mother never leaves him. Every one is so good to us
+  here. His officers seem to think a lot of Sid. So do the men of
+  his company, as far as we have seen them. I don't know what to
+  write you, Father. The doctor says, 'While there's life there's
+  hope, and that our coming is the only thing that has saved Sid so
+  far. He says that he has seen the sickest of boys pull through
+  with their mothers here. We will telegraph when there is any
+  change. Love to all of you, dear ones, and tell Elliott I shall
+  never forget what she has done for me.
+
+                                                             "LAURA"
+
+The room was very still for a minute. Elliott kept her eyes on the
+letter, to hide the tears that filled them. Sidney was going to die;
+she knew it.
+
+Slowly, silently, one after another, they all got up from the table.
+The boys filed out into the kitchen, washed their hands at the sink,
+and still without a word went about their work. Gertrude and Priscilla
+began mechanically to clear the table. A plate crashed to the floor
+from Gertrude's hands and shattered to fragments. She stared at the
+pieces stupidly, as though wondering how they had come there, took a
+step in the direction of the dust-pan, and, suddenly bursting into
+tears, turned and ran out of the room. Elliott could hear her feet
+pounding up-stairs, on, on, till they reached the attic. A door
+slammed and all was quiet.
+
+Down in the kitchen Elliott and Priscilla faced each other. Great
+round drops were running down Priscilla's cheeks, but she looked up at
+Elliott trustfully. And then Elliott failed her. She knew herself that
+she was failing. But it seemed as though she just couldn't keep from
+crying. "Oh, dear!" she sighed. "Oh, dear, isn't everything just
+_awful_!" Then she did cry.
+
+And over Priscilla's sober little face--Elliott wasn't so blinded by
+her tears that she failed to see it--came the queerest expression of
+stupefaction and woe and utter forlornness. It was after that that
+Elliott heard Priscilla sobbing in the china-closet.
+
+Her first impulse was to go to the closet and pull the child out. Her
+second was to let her stay. "She may as well have her cry out,"
+thought the girl, unhappily. "_I_ couldn't do anything to comfort
+her!"--which shows how very, very, very miserable Elliott was,
+herself.
+
+The world was topsyturvy and would never get right again.
+
+Instead of going for Priscilla she went for a dust-pan and brush and
+collected the fragments of broken china. Then she began to pile up the
+dishes, but, after a few futile movements, sat down in a chair and
+cried again. It didn't seem worth while to do anything else. So now
+there were three girls crying all at once in that house and every one
+of them in a different place. When at last Elliott did look in the
+closet Priscilla wasn't there.
+
+The appearance of that usually spotless kitchen had a queer effect on
+Elliott. She saw so many things needing to be done at once that she
+didn't do any of them. She simply stood and stared hopelessly at the
+wreck of comfort and cleanliness and good cheer.
+
+"Hello!" said Bruce at the door. "Want an extra hand for an hour?"
+
+"I thought you were cutting ensilage," said Elliott. It was good to
+see Bruce; the courage in his voice lifted her spirits in spite of
+her.
+
+"I've left a substitute." The boy glanced into the stove and started
+for the wood-box.
+
+"Oh, dear! I forgot that fire. Has it gone out?"
+
+"Not quite. I'll have it going again in a jiff."
+
+He came back with a broom in his hands.
+
+"Let me do that," said the girl.
+
+"Oh, all right." He relinquished the broom and brought out the
+dish-pan. "Hi-yi, Stan, lend a hand here!"
+
+The boy in the doorway gave one glance at Elliott's tear-stained face
+and came quietly into the room. "Sure," he said, picking up a
+dish-cloth and gingerly reaching for a tumbler. "Which end do you take
+'em by, top or bottom?"
+
+Stannard wiping dishes, and with Bruce Fearing! The sight was so
+strange that Elliott's broom stopped moving. The two boys at the
+dish-pan chaffed each other good-naturedly; their jokes might have
+seemed a little forced, had you examined them carefully, but the
+effect was normal and cheering. Now and then they threw a word to the
+girl and the pile of clean dishes grew under their hands.
+
+Elliott's broom began to move again. Something warm stirred at her
+heart. She felt sober and humble and ashamed and--yes, happy--all at
+once. How nice boys were when they were nice!
+
+Then she remembered something.
+
+"Oh, Stan, wasn't it to-day you were going home?"
+
+"Nix," Stannard replied. "Guess I'll stay on a bit. School hasn't
+begun. I want to go nutting before I hit the trail for home."
+
+It was a different-looking kitchen the boys left half an hour later
+and a different-looking girl.
+
+Bruce lingered a minute behind Stannard. "We haven't had any
+telegram," he said. "Remember that. And as for things in here, I
+wouldn't let 'em bother me, if I were you! You can't do everything,
+you know. Keep cool, feed us the stuff folks send in, and let some
+things slide."
+
+"Mother Jess doesn't let things slide."
+
+"Mother Jess has been at it a good many years, but I'll bet she would
+now and then if things got too thick and she couldn't keep both
+ends up. There's more to Mother Jess's job than what they call
+housekeeping."
+
+"Oh, yes," sighed Elliott, "I know that. But just what do you mean,
+Bruce, that I could do?"
+
+He hesitated a minute. "Well, call it morale. That suggests the
+thing."
+
+Elliott thought hard for a minute after the door closed on Bruce.
+Perhaps, after all, seeing that the family had three meals a day and
+lived in a decently clean house and slept warm at night, necessary as
+such oversight was, wasn't the most imperative business in hand.
+Somehow or other those things weren't at all what came into her mind
+when she thought of Aunt Jessica--no, indeed, though Aunt Jessica made
+such perfectly delicious things to eat. What came into her mind was
+far different--like the way Aunt Jessica had sat on Elliott's bed and
+kissed her, that homesick first night; Aunt Jessica's face at
+meal-time, with Uncle Bob across the table and all her boys and girls
+filling the space between; Aunt Jessica comforting Priscilla when the
+child had met with some mishap. Priscilla seldom cried when she hurt
+herself; "Mother kisses the place and makes it well." The words linked
+themselves with Bruce's in Elliott's thought. Was that what he had
+meant by morale? She couldn't have put into words what she understood
+just then. For a minute a door in her brain seemed to swing open and
+she saw straight into the heart of things. Then it clicked together
+and left her saying, "I guess I fell down on that part of my job,
+Mother Jess."
+
+Elliott hung up her apron and mounted the stairs. She didn't stop with
+the second floor and her own little room, but kept right on to the
+attic. There was a door at the head of the attic stairs. Elliott
+pushed it open. On a broken-backed horsehair sofa Gertrude lay, face
+down, her nose buried in a faded pillow. In a wabbly rocker, at
+imminent risk of a breakdown, Priscilla jerked back and forth.
+Gertrude's hair was tousled and Priscilla's face was tear-stained and
+swollen.
+
+"Don't you think," Elliott suggested, "it is time we girls washed our
+faces and made ourselves pretty?"
+
+"I left you all the dishes to do." Gertrude's voice was muffled by the
+pillow. "I--I just couldn't help it."
+
+"That's all right. They're done now. I didn't do them, either. Let's
+go down-stairs and wash up."
+
+"I don't want to be pretty," Priscilla objected, continuing to rock.
+Gertrude neither moved nor spoke again.
+
+What should Elliott do? She remembered Bruce.
+
+"We haven't had any telegram, you know," she said. Nobody spoke.
+"Well, then, we were three little geese, weren't we? Not having had a
+telegram means a lot just now." Priscilla stopped rocking.
+
+"I'm going to believe Sidney will get well," Elliott continued. It was
+hard work to talk to such unresponsive ears, but she kept right on.
+"And now I am going down-stairs to put on one of my prettiest dresses,
+so as to look cheerful for supper. You may try whether you can get
+into that blue dress of mine you like so much, Trudy. I'm going to let
+Priscilla wear my coral beads."
+
+"The pink ones?" asked Priscilla.
+
+"The pink ones. They will be just a match for your pink dress."
+
+"I don't feel like dressing up," said Gertrude.
+
+Elliott felt like clapping her hands. She had roused Trudy to speech.
+
+"Then wear something of your own," she said stanchly. "It doesn't
+matter what we wear, so long as we look nice."
+
+Mercurial Priscilla was already feeling the new note in the air.
+Elliott wouldn't talk so, would she, if Sidney really were not going
+to get well? And yet there was Gertrude, who didn't seem to feel
+cheered up a bit. Pris's little heart was torn.
+
+Elliott tried one last argument. "I think Mother Jess would like to
+have us do it for Father Bob and the boys' sake--to help keep up their
+courage."
+
+Priscilla bounced out of the rocker. "Will it help keep up their
+courage for us to wear our pretty clothes?"
+
+"I had a notion it might."
+
+"Let's do it, Trudy. I--I think I feel better already."
+
+Gertrude sat up on the horsehair sofa. "Maybe Mother would like us
+to."
+
+"I'm sure she'd like us to keep on hoping," said Elliott earnestly.
+"And it doesn't matter what we do, so long as we do something to show
+that's the way we've made up our minds to feel. If you can think of
+any better way to show it than by dressing up, Trudy--"
+
+"No," said Gertrude. "But I think I'll wear my own clothes to-day,
+Elliott. Thank you, just the same. Some day, if Sid--I mean some day
+I'll love to try on your blue dress, if you will let me."
+
+Three girls, as pretty and chic and trim as nature and the contents of
+their closets could make them, sat down to supper that night. It was
+not a jolly meal, but the girls set the pace, and every one did his
+best to be cheerful and brave.
+
+Half-way through supper Stannard laid down his fork to ask a question.
+"What's happened to your hair, Trudy?"
+
+"Elliott did it for me. Do you like it?"
+
+Stannard nodded. "Good work!"
+
+Father Bob, his attention aroused, inspected the three with new
+interest in his sober eyes. He said nothing then, but after supper his
+hand fell on Elliott's shoulder approvingly.
+
+"Well done, little girl! That's the right way. Face the music with
+your chin up."
+
+Elliott felt exactly as though some one had stiffened her spine. The
+least little doubt had been creeping into her mind lest what she had
+done had been heartless. Father Bob's words put that qualm at rest.
+And, of course, good news would come from Sidney in the morning.
+
+But courage has a way of ebbing in spite of one. It was dark and very
+cold when a forlorn little figure appeared beside Elliott's bed.
+
+"I can't go to sleep. Trudy's asleep. I can hear her. I think I am
+going to cry again."
+
+Elliott sat up. What should she do? What would Aunt Jessica do?
+
+"Come in here and cry on me."
+
+Priscilla climbed in between the sheets and Elliott put both arms
+around the little girl. Priscilla snuggled close.
+
+"I tried to think--the way you said, but I can't. _Is_ Sidney--"
+sniffle--"going to die--" sniffle--"like Ted Gordon?"
+
+"No," said Elliott, who a minute ago had been afraid of the very same
+thing. "No, I am perfectly positive he is going to get well."
+
+Just saying the words seemed to help, somehow.
+
+Priscilla snuggled closer. "You're awful comforting. A person gets
+scared at night."
+
+"A person does, indeed."
+
+"Not so much when you've got company," said Priscilla.
+
+The warmth of the little body in her arms struck through to Elliott's
+own shivering heart. "Not half so much when you've got company," she
+acknowledged.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+MISSING
+
+
+Sure enough, in the morning came better news. Father Bob's face, when
+he turned around from the telephone, told that, even before he opened
+his lips.
+
+"Sidney is holding his own," he said.
+
+You may think that wasn't much better news, but it meant a great deal
+to the Camerons. "Sidney is holding his own," they told every one who
+inquired, and their faces were hopeful. If Father Bob had any fears,
+he kept them to himself. The rest of the Camerons were young and it
+didn't seem possible to them that Sidney could do anything but get
+well. Last night had been a bad dream, that was all.
+
+The next morning's message had the word "better" in it. "Little" stood
+before "better," but nobody, not even Father Bob, paid much attention
+to "little." Sidney was better. It was a week before Mother Jess wrote
+that the doctors pronounced him out of danger and that she and Laura
+would soon be home. Meanwhile, many things had happened.
+
+You might have thought that Sidney's illness was enough trouble to
+come to the Camerons at one time, but as Bruce quoted with a twist in
+his smile, "It never rains but it pours." This time Bruce himself got
+the message which came from the War Department and read:
+
+  You are informed that Lieutenant Peter Fearing has been reported
+  missing since September fifteenth. Letter follows.
+
+The Camerons felt as badly as though Peter Fearing had been their own
+brother.
+
+"The telegram doesn't say that he's dead," Trudy declared, over and
+over again.
+
+"Maybe he's a prisoner," Tom suggested.
+
+"Perhaps he had to come down in a wood somewhere," Henry speculated,
+"and will get back to our lines."
+
+"The government makes mistakes sometimes," Stannard said. "There was a
+woman in Upton--" He went on with a long story about a woman whose son
+was reported killed in France on the very day the boy had been in his
+mother's house on furlough from a cantonment. There were a great many
+interesting and ingenious details to the story, but nobody paid much
+attention to them. "So you never can tell," Stannard wound up.
+
+"No, you never can tell," Bruce agreed, but he didn't look convinced.
+Something, he was quite sure, was wrong with Pete.
+
+"Don't anybody write Mother Jess," he said. "She and Laura have enough
+to worry about with Sid."
+
+"What if they see it in the papers?" Elliott asked.
+
+"They're busy. Ten to one they won't see it, since it isn't head-lined
+on the front page. Wait till we get the letter."
+
+"How soon do you suppose the letter will come?" Gertrude wished to
+know.
+
+"'Letter follows,'" Henry read from the yellow slip which the postman
+delivered from the telegraph office. "That means right away, I should
+say."
+
+"Maybe it does and maybe it doesn't," said Tom and then _he_ had a
+story to tell. It didn't take Tom long, for he was a boy of fewer
+words than Stannard.
+
+Morning, noon, and night the Camerons speculated about that telegram.
+They combed its words with a fine-toothed comb, but they couldn't make
+anything out of them except the bald fact that Pete was missing.
+
+If you think they let it go at that, you are very much mistaken. Where
+the fact stopped the Cameron imaginations began, and imaginations
+never know where to stop. The less actual information an imagination
+has to work on, the busier it is. The Camerons hadn't any more
+imagination than most people, but what they had grew very busy. It
+fairly amazed them with its activity. If you think that this was silly
+and that they ought to have chained up their imaginations until the
+promised letter arrived, it only shows that you have never received
+any such telegram.
+
+After all, the letter, when it came, didn't tell them much. The letter
+said that Lieutenant Peter Fearing had gone out with his squadron on a
+bombing-expedition well within the enemy lines. The formation had
+successfully accomplished its raid and was returning when it was taken
+by surprise and surrounded by a greatly superior force of enemy
+planes, which gave the Americans a running fight of thirty-nine
+minutes to their lines. Lieutenant Fearing's was one of two planes
+which failed to return to the aerodrome. When last seen, his machine
+was in combat with four Hun planes over enemy territory.
+
+"What did I tell you?" interrupted Tom. "He's a prisoner."
+
+An airplane had been reported as falling in flames near this spot, but
+whether it was Lieutenant Fearing's machine or another, no data was as
+yet at hand to prove. The writer begged to remain, etc.
+
+No, that letter only opened up fresh fields for Cameron imaginations
+to torment Cameron hearts. Nobody had happened to think before of
+Pete's machine catching fire.
+
+"Gee!" said Henry, "if that plane was his--"
+
+"There's no certainty that it was," said Bruce, quickly.
+
+All the Camerons, you see, knew perfectly well what happens to an
+aviator whose machine catches fire.
+
+"If that machine was Pete's," Father Bob mused, "Hun aviators may drop
+word of him within our lines. They have done that kind of thing
+before."
+
+"Wouldn't Bob cable, if he knew anything more than this letter says?"
+Gertrude questioned.
+
+"I expect Bob's waiting to find out something certain before he
+cables," said Father Bob. "Doubtless he has written. We shall just
+have to wait for his letter."
+
+"Wait! Gee!" whispered Henry.
+
+"Both the boys' letters were so awfully late, in the summer!" sighed
+Gertrude. "However can we wait for a letter from Bob?"
+
+Elliott said nothing at all. Her heart was aching with sympathy for
+Bruce. When a person could do something, she thought, it helped
+tremendously. Mother Jess and Laura had gone to Sidney and she had had
+a chance to make Laura's going possible, but there didn't seem to be
+anything she could do for Bruce. And she wished to do something for
+Bruce; she found that she wished to tremendously. Thinking about
+Mother Jess and Laura reminded her to look up and ask, "What _are_ we
+going to write them at Camp Devens?"
+
+Then she discovered that she and Bruce were alone in the room. He was
+sitting at Mother Jess's desk, in as deep a brown study as she had
+been. The girl's voice roused him.
+
+"The kind of thing we've been writing--home news. Time enough to tell
+them about Pete when they get here. By that time, perhaps, there will
+be something definite to tell." He hesitated a minute. "Laura is going
+to feel pretty well cut up over this."
+
+Elliott looked up quickly. "Especially cut up?"
+
+"I think so. Oh, there wasn't anything definite between her and
+Pete--nothing, at least, that they told the rest of us. But a fellow
+who had eyes--" He left the sentence unfinished and walked over to
+Elliott's chair. "You know, I told you," he said, "that I shouldn't go
+into this war unless I was called. Of course I'm registered now, but
+whether or not they call me--if Pete is out of it--and I can possibly
+manage it, I'm going in."
+
+A queer little pain contracted Elliott's heart. And then that odd
+heart of hers began to swell and swell until she thought it would
+burst. She looked at the boy, with proud eyes. It didn't occur to her
+to wonder what she was proud of. Bruce Fearing was no kin of hers, you
+know.
+
+"I knew you would." Somehow it seemed to the girl that she could
+always tell what Bruce Fearing was going to do, and that there was
+nothing strange in such knowledge. How strong he was! how splendid and
+understanding and fine! "Oh," she cried, "I wish, _how_ I wish I could
+help you!"
+
+"You do help me," he said.
+
+"I?" Her eyes lifted in real surprise. "How can I?"
+
+"By being you."
+
+His hand had only to move an inch to touch hers, but it lay
+motionless. His eyes, gray and steady and clear, held the girl's. She
+gave him back look for look.
+
+"I am glad," she said softly and her face was like a flower.
+
+Bruce was out of the house before Elliott thought of the thing she
+could do for him.
+
+"Mercy me!" she cried. "You're the slowest person I've ever seen in my
+life, Elliott Cameron!" She ran to the kitchen door, but the boy was
+nowhere in sight. "He must be out at the barn," she said and took a
+step in that direction, only to take it back. "No, I won't. I'll just
+go by myself _and do it_."
+
+Whatever it was, it put her in a great hurry. As fast as she had
+dashed to the kitchen she now ran to the front hall, but the third
+step of the stairs halted her.
+
+"Elliott Cameron," she declared earnestly, "I do believe you have lost
+your mind! Haven't you any sense _at all_? And you a responsible
+housekeeper!"
+
+Perhaps it wasn't the first time a whirlwind had ever struck the
+Cameron farmhouse. Elliott hadn't a notion that she could work
+so fast. Her feet fairly flew. Bed-covers whisked into place;
+dusting-cloths raced over furniture; even milk-pans moved with
+unwonted celerity. But she left them clean, clean and shining.
+
+"There!" said the girl, "now we shall do well enough till dinner-time.
+I'm going into the village. Anybody want to come?"
+
+Priscilla jumped up. "I do, unless Trudy wants to more."
+
+Gertrude shook her head. "I'm going to put up tomatoes," she said,
+"the rest of the ripe ones."
+
+"Don't you want help?"
+
+"Not a bit. Tomatoes are no work, at all."
+
+Elliott dashed up-stairs. In a whirl of excitement she pinned on her
+hat and counted her money. No matter how much it cost, she meant to
+say all that she wanted to.
+
+Her cheeks were pink and her dimples hard at work playing hide-and-seek
+with their own shadows, when she cranked the little car. Everything
+would come right now; it couldn't fail to come right. Priscilla
+hopped into the seat beside her and they sped away.
+
+"I have cabled Father," Elliott announced at dinner, with the
+prettiest imaginable little air of importance and confidence, "I have
+cabled Father to find out all he can about Pete and to let us know _at
+once_. Perhaps we shall hear something to-morrow."
+
+But the next day passed, and the next, and the day after that, and
+still no cable from Father.
+
+It was very bewildering. At first Elliott jumped every time the
+telephone rang, and took down the receiver with quickened pulses. No
+matter what her brain said, her heart told her Father would send good
+news. She couldn't associate him with thoughts of ill news. Of course,
+her brain said there was no logic in that kind of argument, and that
+facts were facts; and in a case like Pete's, fathers couldn't make or
+mar them. Her heart kept right on expecting good tidings.
+
+But when long days and longer nights dragged themselves by and no
+word at all came from overseas, the girl found out what a big empty
+place the world may become, even while it is chuck-full of people,
+and what three thousand miles of water really means. She thought
+she had known before, but she hadn't. So long as letters traveled
+back and forth, irregularly timed it might be, but continuously,
+she still kept the familiar sense of Father--out of sight, but there,
+as he had always been, most dependably _there_. Now, for the first
+time in her life, she had called to him and he had not answered.
+There might be--there probably were, she reminded herself--reasons
+why he hadn't answered; good, reassuring reasons, if one only knew
+them. He might be temporarily in a region out of touch with cables;
+the service might have dropped a link somewhere. One could imagine
+possible explanations. But it was easier to imagine other things. And
+the fact remained that, since he didn't answer, she couldn't get
+away from a horrible, paralyzing sense that he wasn't there.
+
+It didn't do any good to try to run from that sensation; there was
+nowhere to run. It blocked every avenue of thought, a sinister shape
+of dread. The only help was in keeping very, very busy. And even then
+one couldn't stop one's thoughts traveling, traveling, traveling along
+those fearful paths.
+
+At last Elliott knew how the others felt about Pete. She had thought
+she understood that and felt it, too, but now she found that she
+hadn't. It makes all the difference in the world, she discovered,
+whether one stands inside or outside a trouble. The heart that had
+ached so sympathetically for Bruce knew its first stab of loss and
+recoiled. The others recognized the difference; or was it only that
+Elliott herself had eyes to see what she had been blind to before? No
+one said anything. In little unconscious, lovable ways they made it
+quite clear that now she was one with them.
+
+"Perhaps we would better send for them to come home from Camp Devens,"
+Father Bob suggested one day. He threw out his remark at the
+supper-table, which would seem to address it to the family at large,
+but he looked straight at Elliott.
+
+"Oh, no," she cried, "don't _send_ for them!" But she couldn't keep a
+flash of joy out of her eyes.
+
+"Sure you're not getting tired?"
+
+"Certain sure!"
+
+It disappointed her the least little bit that Uncle Bob let the
+suggestion drop so readily. And she was disappointed at her own
+disappointment. "Can't you 'carry on' _at all_?" she demanded of
+herself, scornfully. "It was all your own doing, you know." But how
+she did long at times for Aunt Jessica!
+
+Of course, Elliott couldn't cry, however much she might wish to, with
+the family all taking their cues from her mood. She said so fiercely
+to every lump that rose in her throat. She couldn't indulge herself at
+all adequately in the luxury of being miserable; she couldn't even let
+herself feel half as scared as she wished to, because, if she did,
+just once, she couldn't keep control of herself, and if she lost
+control of herself there was no telling where she might end--certainly
+in no state that would be of any use to the family. No, for their
+sake, she must sit tight on the lid of her grief and fear and
+anxiety.
+
+But there were hours when the cover lifted a little. No girl, not the
+bravest, could avoid such altogether. Elliott didn't think herself
+brave, not a bit. She knew merely that the thing she had to do
+couldn't be done if there were many such hours.
+
+One day Bruce heard somebody sobbing up in the hay-loft. The sound
+didn't carry far; it was controlled, suppressed; but Bruce had gone up
+the ladder for something or other, I forget just what, and, thinking
+Priscilla was in trouble, he kept on. The girl crying, face down in
+the hay, wasn't Priscilla. Very softly Bruce started to tiptoe away,
+but the rustling of the hay under his feet betrayed him.
+
+"I didn't mean--any one to--find me."
+
+"Shall I go away?"
+
+She shook her head. "I can't stand it!" she wailed. "I simply can't
+_stand it_!" And she sobbed as though her heart would break.
+
+Bruce sat down beside the girl on the hay and patted the hand nearest
+him. He didn't know anything else to do. Her fingers closed on his
+convulsively.
+
+"I'm an awful old cry-baby," she choked at last. "I'll behave myself,
+in a minute."
+
+"No, cry away," said Bruce. "A girl has to cry sometimes."
+
+After a while the racking sobs spent themselves. "There!" she said,
+sitting up. "I never thought I'd let a boy see me cry. Now I must go
+in and help Trudy get supper."
+
+She dabbed at her eyes with a wet little wad of linen. Bruce plucked a
+clean handkerchief from his pocket and tucked it into her fingers.
+
+"Yours doesn't seem quite big enough for the job," he said.
+
+She took it gratefully. She had never thought of a boy as a very
+comforting person, but Bruce was. "Oh, Bruce, you _know_!"
+
+"Yes, I know."
+
+"It's so--so lonely. Dad's all I've got, of my really own, in the
+world."
+
+He nodded. "You're gritty, all right."
+
+"Why, Bruce Fearing! how can you say that after the way I've acted?"
+
+"That's why I say it."
+
+"But I'm scared all the time. If I did what I wanted to, I'd be a
+perpetual fountain."
+
+"And you're not."
+
+She stared at him. "Is being scared and trying to cover it up what you
+call grit?"
+
+"The grittiest kind of grit."
+
+For a sophisticated girl she was singularly naive, at times. He
+watched her digest the idea, sitting up on the hay, her chin cupped in
+her two hands, straws in her hair. Her eyes were swollen and her nose
+red, and his handkerchief was now almost as wet as her own. "I thought
+I was an awful coward," she said.
+
+A smile curved his firm lips, but the steady gray eyes were tender. "I
+shouldn't call you a coward."
+
+She shook herself and stood up. "Bruce, you're a darling. Now, will
+you please go and see if the coast is clear, so I can slide up-stairs
+without being seen? I must wash up before supper."
+
+"I'd get supper," he said, "if I didn't have to milk to-night.
+Promised Henry."
+
+She shook her head positively. "I'll let you do lots of things, Bruce,
+but I won't let you get supper for me--not with all the other things
+you have to do."
+
+"Oh, all right! I dare you to jump off the hay."
+
+"Down there? Take you!" she cried, and with the word sprang into the
+air.
+
+Beside her the boy leaped, too. They landed lightly on the fragrant
+mass in the bay of the barn.
+
+"Oh," she cried, "it's like flying, isn't it! Why wasn't I brought up
+on a farm?"
+
+There was a little choke still left in her voice, and her smile was a
+trifle unsteady, but her words were ready enough. In the doorway she
+turned and waved to the boy and then went on, her head held high,
+slender and straight and gallant, into the house.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+HOME-LOVING HEARTS
+
+
+Mother Jess and Laura were coming home. Perhaps Father Bob had dropped
+a hint that their presence was needed in the white house at the end of
+the road; perhaps, on the other hand, they were just ready to come.
+Elliott never knew for certain.
+
+Father Bob met the train, while all the Cameron boys and girls flew
+around, making ready at home. The plan had developed on the tacit
+understanding that since they all wished to, it was fairer for none of
+them to go to the station.
+
+Priscilla and Prince were out watching. "They're coming!" she
+squealed, skipping back into the house. "Trudy, Elliott, everybody,
+they're coming!" And she was out again, darting in long swallow-like
+swoops down the hill. From every direction came Camerons, running;
+from house, barn, garden, young heads moved swiftly toward the little
+car chug-chugging up the hill.
+
+They swarmed over it, not giving it time to stop, jumping on the
+running-board, riding on the hood, almost embracing the car itself in
+the joy of their welcome. Elliott hung back. The others had the first
+right. After their turns--
+
+Without a word Aunt Jessica took the girl into her arms and held her
+tight. In that strong, tender clasp all the stinging ache went out of
+Elliott's hurt. She wasn't frightened any longer or bewildered or
+bitter; she didn't know why she wasn't, but she wasn't. She felt just
+as if, somehow or other, things were going to be right.
+
+She had this feeling so strongly that she forgot all about dreading to
+meet Laura--for she had dreaded to meet Laura, she was so sorry for
+her--and kissed her quite naturally. Laura kissed Elliott in return
+and said, "Wait till I get you up-stairs," as though she meant
+business, and smiled just as usual. Her face was a trifle pale, but
+her eyes were bright, and the clear, steady glow in them reminded
+Elliott for the first time of the light in Aunt Jessica's eyes. She
+hadn't remembered ever seeing Laura's eyes look just like that. How
+much did Laura know, Elliott wondered? She wouldn't look so, would
+she, if she had heard about Pete? But, strangely enough, Elliott
+didn't fear her finding out or feel nervous lest she might have to
+tell her.
+
+And after all, as soon as they got up-stairs, it came out that Laura
+did know about Pete, for she said: "I'm glad, oh, so glad, that
+wherever Pete is now, he got across and had a chance really to do
+something in this fight. If you had seen what I have seen this last
+week, Elliott--"
+
+The shining look in Laura's face fascinated Elliott.
+
+All at once she felt her own words come as simply and easily as
+Laura's. "But will that be enough, Laura--always?"
+
+"No," said Laura, "not always. But I shall always be proud and glad,
+even if I do have to miss him all my life. And, of course, I can't
+help feeling that we may hear good news yet. Now--oh, you blessed,
+blessed girl!"
+
+And the two clung together in a long close embrace that said many
+things to both of them, but not a word aloud.
+
+How good it seemed to have Mother Jess and Laura in the house! Every
+one went about with a hopeful face, though, after all, not an inch had
+the veil of silence lifted that hung between the Cameron farm and the
+world overseas. Every one, Elliott suspected, shared the feeling she
+had known, the certainty that all would be well now Mother Jess was
+home. It wasn't anything in particular that Mother Jess said or did
+that contributed to this impression. Just to see her face in a room,
+to touch her hand now and then, to hear her voice, merely to know she
+was in the house, seemed enough to give it.
+
+They all had so much to say to one another. The returned travelers
+must tell of Sidney, and the Camerons who had stayed at home had tales
+of how they had "carried on" in the others' absence. Tongues were very
+busy, but no one forgot those who weren't there--not for a minute. The
+sense of them lived underneath all the confidences. There were
+confidences _en masse_, so to speak, and confidences _a deux_.
+Priscilla chattered away into her mother's ear without once stopping
+to catch breath, and Bruce had his own quiet report to make. Perhaps
+Bruce and Priscilla and the rest said more than Elliott heard, for
+when Aunt Jessica bade her good-night she rested a hand lightly on the
+girl's shoulder.
+
+"You dear, brave little woman!" she said. "All the soldiers aren't in
+camp or over the seas."
+
+Elliott put the words away in her memory. They made her feel like a
+man who has just been decorated by his general.
+
+She felt so comforted and quiet, so free from nervousness, that not
+even the telephone bell could make her jump. It tinkled pretty
+continuously, too. That was because all the next day the neighbors who
+didn't come in person were calling up to inquire for the returned
+travelers. Elliott quite lost the expectation that every time the
+telephone buzzed it meant a possible message for her.
+
+She had lost it so completely that when, as they were on the point of
+sitting down at supper, Laura said, "There's the telephone again, and
+my hands are full," Elliott remarked, "I'll see who it is," and took
+down the receiver without a thought of a cable.
+
+"This is Elliott Cameron speaking.... Yes--yes. Elliott Cameron. All
+ready." A tremor crept into the girl's voice. "I didn't get that....
+Just received my message? Yes, go on.... Repeat, please.... Wait a
+minute till I call some one."
+
+She wheeled from the instrument, her face alight. "Where's Bruce?
+Please, somebody, call--oh, here you are!" She thrust the receiver
+into his hands. "Make them repeat the message to you. It's from
+Father. Pete was a prisoner. He's escaped and got back to our lines."
+
+Then she slipped into Aunt Jessica's waiting arms.
+
+Supper? Who cared about supper? The Camerons forgot it. When they
+remembered, the steaming-hot creamed potato was cold and the salad was
+wilted, but that made no difference. They were too excited to know
+what they were eating.
+
+To make assurance trebly sure there were more messages. Bob cabled of
+Pete's escape through the Hun lines and the government wired from
+Washington. The Camerons' happiness spilled over into blithe
+exuberance. They laughed and danced and sang for very joy. Priscilla
+jigged all over the house like an excited brown leaf in a breeze. None
+of them, except Father Bob, Mother Jess, and Laura, could keep still.
+Laura went about like a person in a trance, with a strange, happy
+quietness in her ordinarily energetic movements and a brightness in
+her face that dazzled. There was no boisterousness in any one's
+rejoicing, only a gentleness of gaiety that was very wonderful to see
+and feel.
+
+As for Elliott, she felt as though she had come out from underneath a
+great dark cloud, into a place where she could never again be anything
+but good and happy. She had been coming out ever since Aunt Jessica
+reached home, but she hadn't come out the same as she went in. The
+Elliott Aunt Jessica and Laura had left in charge when they went to
+Camp Devens seemed very, very far away from the Elliott whose joy was
+like wings that fairly lifted her feet off the ground. Smiles chased
+one another among her dimples in ceaseless procession across her face.
+She didn't try to discover why she felt so different. She didn't care.
+The dimples, of course, were the very same dimples she had always had,
+and at the moment the girl was entirely unconscious of their
+existence, though as a matter of fact those dimples had never been
+busier and more bewitching in all Elliott Cameron's life.
+
+"I suppose," Mother Jess said at last, "we shall have to go to bed, if
+we are to get Stannard off in the morning."
+
+Going to bed isn't a very exciting thing to do when you are so happy
+you feel as though you might burst with joy, but by that time the
+Camerons had managed to work out of the most dangerous stage, and
+inasmuch as Stannard's was an early train, going to bed was the only
+sensible thing to do. So they did it.
+
+What was more remarkable, the last sleepy Cameron straggled down to
+the breakfast-table before the little car ran up to the door to take
+Stannard away. They were really sorry to see him go and he acted as
+though he were just as sorry to go, which would seem to indicate that
+Stannard, too, had changed in the course of the summer. He looked much
+like the long, lazy Stannard who had rebelled against a vacation on a
+farm, but his carriage was better and his figure sturdier, and his
+hands weren't half so white and gentlemanlike. Underneath his lazy
+ease was a hint of something to depend on in an emergency. Perhaps
+even his laziness wasn't so ingrained as it used to be.
+
+They all went out on the veranda to say good-by and waved as long as
+the car was in sight.
+
+"Sorry you're not going, too?" Bruce asked Elliott.
+
+"Oh, no! I wouldn't go for anything."
+
+"For a girl who didn't want to come up here at all," he said softly,
+"you're doing pretty well. Decided to make the best of us, didn't
+you?"
+
+She looked at him indignantly. "Indeed, I didn't! I wouldn't do such a
+thing. Why, I just _love_ it here!" Then she saw the twinkle in his
+eye. "You tease!"
+
+"I'm going away, myself, next week, S. A. T. C. I can't get any nearer
+France than that, it seems, just yet. Father Bob says he can manage
+all right this winter and he has a notion of something new that may
+turn up next spring. He says, 'Go,' and so does Mother Jess. So--I'm
+going."
+
+Elliott stole a quick glance at the firm, clear-cut face, chiseled
+already in lines of purpose and power.
+
+"I'm glad," she said, "but we shall--miss you."
+
+"Shall _you_ miss me?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I'd hate to think that you wouldn't."
+
+Elliott always remembered the morning, three days later, when Bruce
+went away. How blue the sky was, how clear the sunshine, how glorious
+the autumn pageant of the hills! Beside the gate a young maple burned
+like a shaft of flame. True, Bruce was only going to school now, but
+there was France in the background, a beckoning possibility with all
+that it meant of triumph and heroism and pain. That idea of France,
+and the fiery splendor of the hills, seemed to invest Bruce's strong
+young figure with a kind of glory that tightened the girl's throat as
+she waved good-by from the veranda. She was glad Bruce was going, even
+if her throat did ache. Aches like that seemed far less important than
+they used to. She waved with a thrill coursing up her spine and a shy,
+eager sense of how big and wonderful and happy a thing it was to be a
+girl.
+
+With a last wave to Bruce turning the curve of the road Mother Jess
+stepped back into the house.
+
+"Come, girls," she said. "I feel like getting very busy, don't you?"
+
+Elliott followed her contentedly. Others might go, but she didn't
+wish to, not while Father was on the other side of the ocean. It made
+her laugh to think that she had ever wished to. That laugh of pure
+mirth and happiness proved the completeness of Elliott Cameron's
+evacuation.
+
+"What is the joke?" Laura asked, smiling at the radiant charm of the
+dainty figure enveloping itself in a blue apron.
+
+"Oh," said Elliott lightly, "I was thinking that I used to be a queer
+girl."
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Camerons of Highboro, by Beth B. Gilchrist
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