What he did was to release her with decision, and come forward with the courtesy he was quite capable of at any crisis, and welcome Logan to their home.
"You've caught us in the middle of a party," he concluded cordially, "but I don't suppose you feel much like dancing. Perhaps after a little something to eat and drink you'd like to rest a bit. Come speak to Mr. Logan, my dear," he finished, with what Marjorie stigmatized as extreme impudence; and Marjorie, in her firefly draperies, came forward with as creditable a calm as her husband, and greeted Mr. Logan, after which Francis called Mrs. O'Mara to show him to a room where he could rest.
"I came to talk to you——" began Mr. Logan as he was led hospitably away.
"I'll be at your service as soon as you've had a little rest and food," said Francis in his most charming manner.
He actually put his arm about Marjorie again and was going on with the dance, when the telephone rang. The woman nearest it answered it, and called Francis over excitedly. Marjorie, too proud to ask any questions, was nevertheless eaten up with curiosity, and finally edged near enough to hear above the phonograph.
"You'll be all right till to-morrow? Very well—I'll be out then and see what to do."
"What's the matter?" demanded Peggy, who had no pride to preserve.
Francis smiled, but looked a little worried, too.
"Nothing very serious, but inconvenient. Pierre, the cook for the outfit, suddenly decided to leave to-day, and did. He said he thought it was time he got married again, and has gone in quest of a bride, I suppose. The deuce of it is, we're so short-handed. Well, never mind——"
"If mother wasn't so silly about the ghosts," began Peggy.
"Well, she is, if ye call it silly," said Mrs. O'Mara from where she stood with her partner in all the glory of a maroon satin that fitted her as if she were an upholstered sofa. "I'd no more go live in that clearin' with the Wendigees, or whatever 'tis the Canucks talk about, than in Purgatory itself. Wendigees is Injun goblins," she explained to her partner, "and there's worse nor them, too."
She crossed herself expertly, and in almost the same movement swept her partner, not of the tallest, away in a fox-trot. She fox-trotted very well.
Marjorie went on dancing, and hoping that Mr. Logan would go to bed and to sleep, or have a fit of nerves that would incapacitate him from further interfering with her. But the hope was in vain, for Francis appeared from nowhere in about fifteen minutes, and beckoned her to follow him to where she knew Logan was waiting.
The two men sat down gravely in the little wooden room where Logan had been shown. It was Francis who spoke first.
"Mr. Logan insists, Marjorie, that you appealed to him for rescue. He puts it to me, I must say, very reasonably, that no sensible man would travel all this way to bring back a girl unless she had asked him to. He says that you wrote him that you were being treated severely."
"I didn't! I never did!" exclaimed outraged Marjorie, springing up and standing before them. "Show me my letter!"
"Unfortunately," said Mr. Logan wistfully, "I destroyed it, because I have always found that the wisest thing to do with letters. But I am prepared to take my oath that you wrote me, asking me to help you. I am extremely sorry to find that you are in such a position as to—forgive me, Mr. Ellison, but it seems rather like it—to be so dominated by this gentleman as not to even admit——"
"You see what it looks like," broke in Francis, turning to his wife furiously. "Never ask me to believe you again. I don't trust you—I never will trust you. Nobody will, if you keep on as you've begun. Go back with him, then—you're not my slave, much as you may pretend it."
"I won't!" said Marjorie spiritedly. "I've had enough of this. I'll stay here, if it takes ten years, till you admit that you've treated me horribly, and misjudged me. I've played fair. I've no way of proving it, against you two men, but I have! I'll prove it by any test you like."
"There's only one way you can convince me that one word you've said since you came up here was the truth," he told her, suddenly quiet and cold. "If you stay, of your own free will, out there in the clearing; if you take over the work that Pierre fell down on this evening, and stay there looking after me and my men—I'll believe you. There's no fun to doing that, just work; it stands to reason that you wouldn't do that for any reason unless to clear yourself. If you don't want to do that, you may go home with this gentleman; indeed, I won't let you do anything else. Take your choice."
Marjorie looked at him for a moment as if she wanted to do something violent to him. Then she spoke.
CHAPTER VII
"I see what you mean," she said. "I wasn't sporting in the first place—I wouldn't live up to my bargain. That's made you more apt to believe that I've been acting the same way ever since. You don't think I can see _any_thing through. Well—not particularly for your sake—more for my own, I guess—I'm going to see this through, if I die doing it. I'll stay—and take Pierre's place, Francis."
Francis's severe young face did not change at all.
"Very well," he said.
"But you understand," she went on, "that I'm not doing this to win anything but my own self-respect. And at the end of the three months, of course, I shall go back to New York. And you'll let me go, and see that I get free."
"I wouldn't do anything else for the world," said Francis in the same unmoved voice.
"Very well, then—we understand each other." She turned to Logan, who had sprung to his feet and tried to interfere a couple of times while she talked. "And please remember that this arrangement does not go beyond us three," she said. "I would prefer that no one else knew how matters stood."
Logan looked a little baffled. He was ten years older than either of them, but so many actual clashing things happening had never come his way before. His ten years' advantage had been spent writing stylistic essays, and such do not fit one for stepping down into the middle of a lot of primitive young emotions. He felt suddenly helpless before these passionate, unjust, emotional young people. He felt a little forlorn, too, as if the main currents of things had been sweeping them by while he stood carefully on the bank, trying not to get his feet wet. A very genuine emotion of pity for Marjorie had brought him up here, pity more mixed with something else than he had been willing to admit. It was the first thing he had done for a long, long time that was romantic and unconsidered and actual. And it appeared that, after all, he wasn't needed. Concentration on the nuances of minor fifteenth-century poets had unfitted him for being swept on, as these had been, by the world-currents. They had married each other, pushed by the mating instinct in the air—the world's insistence on marriage to balance the death that had swept it. Now they were struggling to find their balance against each other, to be decent, to be fair, to make themselves and each other what they thought they ought to be. He could see what they were doing and why much more clearly than they could themselves. But he couldn't be a part of it—he had stood aside from life too long, with his nerves and his passion for artistic details and pleasures of the intellect.
But he bowed quietly, and smiled a little. He felt suddenly very tired.
"Certainly it shall go no farther," he assured her. "And I owe you an apology for the trouble which I fear I have ignorantly brought upon you. If there is anything I can say——"
She shook her head proudly, and Francis, fronting them both, made a motion of negation, too.
"You must be tired," he added to his gesture. "Or would you care to watch the dancers awhile?"
"No, I thank you," said Mr. Logan courteously in his turn. "If you will tell me of some near-by hotel——"
"There's only this," explained Francis. "But I think your room is ready by now. Miss O'Mara—I'll call her—will show you to it."
Peggy, summoned by a signal whistle from the ballroom, convoyed Logan upstairs with abundant good-will and much curiosity. She had never seen any one like him before, and took in his looks and belongings with the intense and frank absorption of an Indian. Indeed, as she explained to Marjorie, whom she met at the foot of the stairs, it was only by the help of the saints and her own good decency that she didn't follow him into his room and stay there to watch him unpack.
"With the charming, purry voice he has, and all the little curlicues when he finishes his words, and the little cane—does he never sleep without it, would you say?—and the little Latin books he reads——"
But here Marjorie pulled her up.
"How on earth do you know he reads little Latin books?"
Peggy flushed generously.
"Well, if you must know, I gave one teeny weeny peek through the crack in the door after I left him, and he was thrown down across his cot like a long, graceful tomcat or leopard or something, and he pulled a little green leather book out of his pocket and went to reading it on the spot. 'Pervigilium Veneris,' its name was. All down the side."
Marjorie had heard of it; in fact, in pursuance of her education Mr. Logan had made her read several translations of it. It had bored her a little, but she had read it dutifully, because she had felt at that time that it would be nice to be intellectually widened, and because Logan had praised it so highly.
"Oh, yes, I know," she said.
"And is it a holy book?" Peggy inquired.
"Just a long Latin poem about people running around in the woods at night and having a sort of celebration of Venus's birthday," said Marjorie absently. It occurred to her Logan would have been worse shocked if he could have heard her offhand summing-up of his pet poem than he had been by her attitude about going back to New York with him. But she had more important things on her mind than Latin poetry. When Peggy met her she was on her way to go off and think them out.
"Good-night, Peggy," she said. "I'm going to bed. I have to get up early and go to work."
Peggy laughed.
"Don't talk nonsense. The dance isn't half over, and everybody's crazy to dance with you. You can sleep till the crack of doom to-morrow, and with not a soul to stop you."
Marjorie shook her head, smiling a little.
"No. I'm going over to the clearing to do the cooking for the men. I told Francis I would, tonight."
Peggy made the expected outcry.
"To begin with, I'll wager you can't cook—a little bit of a thing like you, that I could blow away with a breath! And you'd be all alone there. Mother won't do it because she's afraid of wraiths"—Peggy pronounced it "wraths," and it was evidently a quotation from Mrs. O'Mara—"and it would be twice as scary for you. Though, to be sure, I suppose you'd have Francis. I suppose that's your reason, the both of you—it sounds like the bossy sort of plan Francis makes."
This had not occurred to Marjorie. But she saw now that the only plausible reason not the truth that they could give for her taking Pierre's job was her desire to see more of her husband.
"Well, it's natural we should want to see more of each other," she began lamely.
"Oh, I suppose so," said Peggy offhandedly, and with one ear pricked toward the music. "But when my time comes I hope I won't be that bad that I drag a poor girl off to do cooking, so I can see the more of her."
"You're getting your sexes mixed," said Francis coolly, strolling up behind the girls. "Peggy, your partner is looking for you. I'll take you over after luncheon to-morrow, Marjorie."
"Very well," she said. "Good-night."
If his heart smote him, as Marjorie's little, indomitable figure mounted the stairs, shoulders back and head high, he made no sign of it. Instead, in spite of the preponderance of men, he went back to the dance, and danced straight through till the end had come.
Marjorie went to bed, as she had said she would do. She did not go to sleep. Marjorie, as has been said, was not brave—that is, she could and did do brave things, but she always did them with her heart in her slippers. She did not know what the cooking would be, but she was sure it would be worse than she could imagine, and too much for her strength. The only comfort was the recollection that the dear brown cabin was hers to live in, every moment that she was not at work. She would have that rest and comfort. There was the shelf of books chosen for her by the far-off Francis who was not doubtful of her, and loved her and dreamed about her, and built a house all around the vision of her. And there might be times when she could hurry up a great deal, and lie on the window-seat and look out at the woodlands and dream.
She finally went to sleep. She wakened with a start, early, vaguely remembering that there was a great deal to do. Full remembrance came as she sprang out of bed and ran down the hall to her bath. She had to pack, and after luncheon Francis would carry her off to imprisonment with hard labor. And—why on earth was she doing it, when she could still go back with Logan? For a long half hour she struggled with herself, one minute deciding; to go back, the next deciding to stay. Finally she faced the thing. She would see it through, if it killed her. She would make Francis respect her, if it took six months instead of three at hard labor. She would take the wages for the work she had done, and go back home a free, self-respecting woman.
She dressed herself quickly, and went down to breakfast, braced to play her part before the O'Maras. Short as her time with them, she was fond of them already.
"I think your devotion is a bit hard on yer wife," remarked Mrs.
O'Mara, whom Peggy had put in possession of the facts. "If I were her,
I'd value an affection more that had less o' dishwashin' in it!"
"She's helping me over a pretty hard place." Francis said this calmly. But he flushed in a way that, as Marjorie knew, meant he was disturbed. "You know every man counts just now, and labor is cruelly scarce. I'm doing mine and a day-laborer's work besides, now. And the contract has to be finished."
"Well, of course, there's a gown or so for her in it," said Mrs. O'Mara comfortably. "And 'tis no more than a woman should do, to help out her man if he needs it. Have ye any aprons or work-dresses, me dear, for if not Peggy and me will make ye some. We've a bolt of stuff."
"No, and I'd be very glad if you would," said Marjorie, feeling the thing more irrevocable every moment.
"And rest this morning, and I'll pack for you," said Peggy affectionately. She led Marjorie out to the swing herself, and went upstairs to pack before she went to help her mother with the breakfast dishes.
Marjorie was too restless to lie still. She went out and walked about the place, and came back and lay down, and so put in the interminable hours till luncheon. After luncheon Francis appeared like the messenger of doom he was, put her and a small bag in the side-car and carried her off to her place of servitude.
The ride, in spite of all, was pleasant. For a while neither of them spoke. Then Francis did.
"I feel as if this was unfair to you—for apparently the O'Maras think, and I suppose everybody will, that you really are doing this to show your fondness for me. I shall have to ask you to let them think so."
"I have," she answered curtly.
"You don't understand. I—I am going to have to stay in the cabin with you. . . . There is the little upstairs balcony, I can bunk in that. You know—the one over the door, with the little winding stair leading up to it. I—I'm sorry."
This was one more thing Marjorie hadn't counted on. But after all what did it matter? She expected to be so deadly tired from the work she had promised to do that she would never know whether Francis was in the house at all. And if there really were bears once in awhile it would really be better not to be all alone with them.
"Very well," she said. She looked hungrily at the thick trees they were speeding through. She supposed she would never have time to lie out under a tree, or go hunting for flowers and new little wood-paths again. She had read stories of lone, draggled women in logging-camps, toiling so hard they hadn't even time to comb their hair, but always wore it pulled back tight from their forehead. This wasn't a logging-camp, but she supposed there was very little difference.
She was very quiet for awhile. Francis, turning finally, a little uneasy, found that she was quietly crying. It happened that he had never seen her cry before.
"Please, Marjorie!" he begged in a terrified voice. "Please stop! Is there anything I can do?"
"You have done everything," she said in a little quiet voice that tried not to break, but did, most movingly, on the last word.
She said nothing more after that. After awhile she got hold of herself, dried her eyes, and began to watch the woods desperately again, as if she would never see them any more. If she had but known it, she was making Francis suffer as much as she was suffering herself.
"I'll bring the rest of your things over now," he said, when he had carried her little bag in and put it on her bed. He went out and left her alone, in the little wood-walled bedroom with its high, latticed windows, and Indian blankets and birch-bark trimmings. She lay on the bed apathetically awhile, then she began to notice things a little. There was a kodak on her bureau. There were snowshoes, too small for a man surely—if you could tell of a thing the size of snowshoes—hanging on the wall. There was a fishing-rod case, with something hanging near it that she imagined was a flybook. There was a little trowel, and a graceful birch-bark basket, as if some one might want to go out and bring home plants. She got up finally, her curiosity stronger than her unhappiness, and investigated.
There was dust on everything. That is, except in one particular. On top of each article she had noticed was a square, clean place about the size of an envelope. There had been a note lying or pinned to each one of the things.
It occurred to Marjorie that a man who had not noticed the dust might have overlooked one of the notes; and she commenced a detailed and careful search. The kodak told no tales, nor the snowshoes. The fishing-rod was only explanatory to the extent of being too light and small for a man, and the basket's only contents were two pieces of oilcloth, apparently designed to keep wet plants from dripping too much.
She rose and tiptoed out into the living-room. There might be more notes there. Her spirits had gone up, and she was laughing to herself a little—it felt like exploring Bluebeard's castle. She investigated the book case, shaking out every book. She ran up to the toy balcony and even pushed out the couch there, noticing for the first time that the balcony had curtains which could be drawn. But there was nothing behind couch or curtains. She put her hands on the little railing and looked down at the room below her, to see if she had missed anything. And her eyes fell on a cupboard which was level with the wall at one side, and had so escaped her eye heretofore. Also there was a scrapbasket which might tell tales.
She dashed down the little stair, and made for the scrapbasket, but Francis was more thorough than she had thought, and it was empty. She opened the cupboard and looked in—there was a little flashlight lying near it, and she illuminated the dark with it. There in the cupboard lay a banjo.
"Gracious!" breathed Marjorie. "What a memory!" For she could play the banjo, and it appeared that she must have said so to Francis in those first days. "He must have dashed home and made out lists every night!" she concluded as she dragged it out. It was unstrung, but new strings lay near it, coiled in their papers. And under the papers, so like them that he had forgotten to destroy it, lay a veritable note.
"It isn't really from him to me," she thought, her heart beating unaccountably as she sat back on her heels and tore the envelope open. "It's from the Francis he thought he was, to the Marjorie he thought I was."
But she read it just the same.
"For my dear little girl, if she comes true," was the superscription.
"I don't know whether you'll find this first or last, honey. But it's for you to play on, sometimes, in the evenings, sitting on the window-seat with me, or out on the veranda if you'd rather. But wherever you sit to play it, I may stay quite close to you, mayn't I?"
She was tired and overstrained. That was probably why she put both arms around the banjo as if it was somebody that loved her, and cried on it very much as if it were a baby. And when she went back to her room to replace things as she had found them she carried it with her.
She was calmer after that, for some reason. She had the illogical feeling that some one had been kind to her. She put her things away in the drawers, and even had the courage to lay out for herself the all-enveloping gingham apron, much shortened, which Mrs. O'Mara had loaned her till she and Peggy could run up some more. She supposed Francis would want her to start in with the cooking that night. So she put on her plainest dress and easiest shoes, and then, there being nothing else to do, took the banjo out into the sitting-room and began to string it. And as she strung she thought.
She was going to have to be pretty close to Francis till her term of service was up; she might as well not fight him. It would make things easier all round if she didn't, as long as she had to keep on friendly terms before people.
The truth was, that she couldn't but feel softened to the man who had written that boyish, loving note. "Even if it wasn't to the her he knew now, it was to the Marjorie of last year, and she was a near relation," thought the Marjorie of this year whimsically.
So when Francis came back with the rest of her baggage he found her on the window-seat with the banjo in her lap, fingering it softly, and smiling at him. She could see that he was a little startled, but he had himself in hand directly, and came forward, saying, "So you found the banjo. I got it for you in the first place. Is it any good?"
"Oh, did you?" inquired his wife innocently. "Yes, it's a very good banjo. Maybe I'll find time to play it some day when the housework for the men is out of the way. What do I do when I begin? And hadn't we better go over now?"
"I didn't expect you to start till to-morrow," he explained. "I've taken one of the men off his regular work to attend to it till then."
"Oh, that's kind of you," she answered, still friendly and smiling to a degree that seemed to perplex him. "But perhaps you could take me over to-night and show me. I'll get supper for us two here, if you like, and afterward we can go over, and you can introduce me to your men as the new cook. I hope they'll like me as well as Pierre."
He looked at her still as if she were behaving in a very unexpected way. A tamed Marjorie was something new in his experience; and tameness at this juncture was particularly surprising. Francis was beginning to feel like a brute, which may have been what his wife intended.
"That's very kind of you," he managed to say. "You're sure you are not too tired for any of that?"
"Being tired isn't going to count, is it?" she asked, smiling. "No, I don't mind doing it. It will be like playing with a doll-house. You know, I love this little place."
In her wicked heart she was thinking, "He shall miss me—oh, if I can keep my temper and be perfectly lovely for three months he shall miss me so when I go and get my divorce that he will want to die!" And she looked up at him, one hand on the banjo, as if they were the best friends in the world.
"It isn't time to get supper yet, is it?" she pursued. "You used to like to hear me sing. Don't you want to sit down here by me while I see how the banjo works, just for a little while?"
"No!" said Francis abruptly. "I have to—I have to go and see after a lot more work."
He flung out the door, and it crashed after him. And Marjorie laughed softly and naughtily to herself over the banjo, and pushed the note that had dwelt within farther down inside her dress. "I wish I had the rest!" said she. "Let me see. The kodak was for both of us to go out and take pictures together, of course. The snowshoes—that would have had to wait till winter. The basket and trowel were so we could plant lots of lovely woodsy things we found around the cabin, to see if they would take root. And he must have been going to teach me to fish. I wonder why he wasn't going to teach me to shoot. There must be a rifle somewhere—maybe it hasn't lost its note, if it was hidden hard enough. And he remembered how I liked 'surprises.' He certainly would have made a good lover if I hadn't——"
She did not finish. She got up and hunted for the rifle, which was not to be found. Then she went into the kitchen and hunted for stores, and wondered how on earth a balanced menu could be evolved from cans and dried things exclusively. But the discovery of a cache of canned vegetables helped her out, and as she really was a good cook, and loved cooking, what Francis returned to was not supper, but a very excellent little dinner. And his wife had found time, as well, to dress herself in the most fluffy and useless-looking of rosy summer frocks, with white slippers. She looked more fragile and decorative and childish than he had ever seen her, leaning across the little table talking brightly to him about her adventures in the discovery of the things that made up the meal.
An old quotation about "breaking a butterfly upon a wheel" came to him as she chattered on, telling him delightedly how she had made up her mind to surprise him with tomato bisque if it was her last act, and how she had discovered a box that was labeled "condensed milk," and opened it with infinite pains and a hatchet; and how after she had nearly killed herself struggling with it, she had finally opened it, and found that what it really contained was deviled ham in small, vivid tins; and how she triumphed over Fate by using the ham with other things for hors d'oeuvres; and how she finally found powdered milk in other tins, and achieved her goal after all.
She was exactly as she would have been if all had gone well; and it is not to be supposed that Francis could help feeling it. At first he was quiet, almost gloomy; but presently, as she talked gaily on about all the trifles she could think of—domestic trifles all of them, or things to do with the cabin and its surroundings—he gave himself up to the enjoyment of the hour. It was as if he said to himself, "I'll forget for this little space of time that it isn't real." He looked absorbedly into the little vivid face at the other side of the table, and once, before he thought, put out his hand to take her hand where it lay, little and slim and fragile-looking, on the table. He drew it back quickly, but not before Marjorie had seen the instinctive motion.
She smiled at him brilliantly, and touched him lightly on the shoulder as she passed.
"Come, help me, Francis," she said. "This is our house, you know, and I mustn't do everything alone. And then I must hurry over to the other cabin, and look over my new kingdom, and it would be a shame to do it after your faithful slaves had gone to bed. They would have to get up and dress and stand at attention, wouldn't they, when they heard your august footstep?"
She laughed openly at him as she went into the kitchen, and he followed her and helped her clear away obediently and smiling.
"And now, we'll go over," she said, when everything was in place again. "Get me my long blue cape, Francis, please. It's hanging against the door in my room."
He came and wrapped her in it, and crossed with her the space between the two cabins.
"They're up yet," he said, and knocked on the door.
CHAPTER VIII
There was nothing surprising or exciting to behold when the door flew open, and the two entered.
"Oh, I've met you before," said Marjorie politely to the man who had opened it. She had danced with him the night before, and it was pleasant to find that she had not to deal entirely with strangers. He was a tired-looking, middle-aged Englishman, with a tanned, plump face that had something whimsical and what Marjorie characterized to herself as motherly about it. And the fact that he was clad in a flannel shirt and very disreputable overalls did not make him the less distinctively gentle-bred. He greeted her courteously, and took out his pipe—a pipe that was even more disreputable than his clothes.
"Mrs. Ellison wanted to come over to-night and see what she had to do,"
Francis explained.
"You mean that you were in earnest about her volunteering to take Pierre's place?" demanded the Englishman, looking at the little smiling figure in pink organdy.
"I know I look useless," interposed Marjorie for herself. "But Mr. Ellison will tell you that I really can work hard. If somebody will only show me a little about the routine I'll be all right."
"I've taken over Pierre's job for the moment," he replied. "Assuredly
I'll show you all I can. But it's rough work for a girl."
Marjorie smiled on.
"Very well, show me, please," she demanded, as she would if the question had been one of walking over red-hot plowshares.
She stood and looked about her as he answered her, so intent that she did not hear what he replied.
The place had rows of bunks in various stages of untidiness. It was lighted by two very smoky kerosene lamps, and had in its middle a table with cards on it. Three men sat about the table, as if they did not quite know whether to come forward and be included in the conversation or not. At the further end Marjorie could see the door that led to the cooking-place, and eyed it with interest.
"These are all of the men who are here," Francis explained. "There is another camp some miles further in the forest."
"Am I to cook for them as well?" demanded Marjorie coolly.
"Oh, no," the Englishman answered. He seemed deeply shocked at the idea. "They have a cook. By the way, Mrs. Ellison, it is only poetic justice that you should have taken over this job; for do you know that the reason Pierre gave for his sudden flight in the direction of marriage was that you and Mr. Ellison looked so happy he got lonesome for a wife!"
"Good gracious!" gasped Marjorie before she remembered herself. . . .
"That is—I didn't know our happiness showed as far off as that."
She did not dare to look at Francis, whom she divined to be standing rigidly behind her. "And now could you show me the place where I have to cook, and the things to cook with?"
Mr. Pennington—Harmsworth-Pennington was his veritable name, as she learned later—took the hint and swept her immediately off to the lean-to. The tout-ensemble was not terrifying. It consisted of a kerosene stove of two burners, another one near it for emergencies, a wooden cupboard full of heavy white dishes, and a lower part to it where the stores were.
"The hardest thing for you will be getting up early," he said sympathetically. "The men have to have breakfast and be out of here by seven o'clock. And they take dinner-pails with them. Then there's nothing to get till the evening meal."
"Of course there'd be tidying to do," suggested Marjorie avidly, for she hated disorder, and saw a good deal about her.
"If you had the strength for it," said Pennington doubtfully.
"Francis thinks I have," she answered with a touch of wickedness.
Francis, behind her, continued to say nothing at all.
She spent five minutes more in the lean-to with the opportune Pennington, and gathered from him, finally, that next morning there would have to be a big pot of oatmeal cooked, and bacon enough fried for five hungry men. Griddle cakes, flapjacks, or breadstuff of some kind had to be produced also; coffee in a pot that looked big enough for a hotel, with condensed milk, and a meal apiece for their dinner-hour.
"I just give 'em anything cold that's left over," said Pennington unsympathetically. "There has to be lots of it, that's all."
Marjorie cried out in horror.
"Oh, they mustn't have those cold! But—do they have to have all that every morning?"
"Great Scott, no!" exclaimed the scandalized Pennington. "Some days they just have flapjacks, and some days just bacon and eggs and bread. And sometimes oatmeal extra. I didn't mean that all these came at once."
She felt a bit relieved.
"I'll be in to-morrow at six," she assured him, still smiling bravely.
"I think I can manage it alone."
"One of us can always do the lifting for you, and odd chores," he told her.
After that she met the other men, and went back to the cabin. Francis was still following her in silence.
"How nice they are, even the grumpy ones!"
she told him radiantly. "Don't forget to knock on my door in time to-morrow, Francis."
She gave him no time to reply. She simply went to bed. And in spite of all that had come and gone she was so tired that she fell asleep as soon as she was there.
She was awakened by Francis's knock at what seemed to her the middle of the night. Then she remembered that the pines shut off the light so that it was high daylight outside before it was in here. A vague feeling of terror came over her before she remembered why; and for a moment she lay still in the unfamiliar bed, trying to remember. When she did remember she was so much more afraid that she sprang out hurriedly, because things, for some reason, are always worse when you aren't quite awake. Or better. But there was nothing to be better just now.
She bathed and dressed with a dogged quickness, trying meanwhile to reassure herself. After all, it was only cooking on a little larger scale than she was used to. After all, it was only for a few months. After all, she mightn't be broken down by it. And—this was the only thing that was any real comfort—it would free her so completely of Francis, this association with him, and the daily, hourly realization that he had treated her in a cruel, unjust way, that when she went back she would be glad to forget that he had ever lived; even the days when he had been so pleasant and comforting.
If Francis knew that the little aproned figure, with flushed cheeks and high-held head, was terrified and homesick under the pride, he said nothing. Nothing, that is, beyond the ordinary courtesies. He offered to help her on with her cloak. After one indignant look at him she let him. The indignation would have puzzled him; but Marjorie's feeling was that a man who would doom you to this sort of a life, put you to such a test as Francis had, was adding insult to injury in helping you on and off with wraps. He, of course, couldn't grasp all this, and felt a little puzzled.
She walked out and over to the door of the lean-to, leaving him to follow.
Pennington's kind and motherly face was peering anxiously out. It came to Marjorie that she was going to have a good deal of trouble keeping him from taking too much work off her shoulders. Some men have the maternal instinct strongly developed, and of such, she was quite sure, was Pennington. She wondered what he was doing so far from England, and what she could do to pay him back for his friendliness—for she felt instinctively that she had a friend in him.
Sure enough, he had started the big pot of water boiling for the oatmeal, and was salting it as she entered.
"Oh, let me!" she cried, and before his doubting eyes she began to stir the oatmeal in.
"I suppose there never was a double boiler big enough," she began doubtfully. "It would save so much trouble."
"We might make one out of a dishpan, perhaps, swung inside this pot," he said.
"And I always thought Englishmen weren't resourceful!" she commented, smiling at him. "We'll try it to-morrow."
Meanwhile, having stirred in all the oatmeal necessary, she lowered the burners a little and began on the coffee. Then she saw the point of the other stove, for she found she needed it for the bacon and biscuits. The actual work was not so complicated; the thing that appalled her was Pennington's insistence on the awful amount of food needed for the six men and herself. But, of course, as she reminded herself, there was a difference between cooking for Cousin Anna and herself on the maid's day out, or for Lucille and herself, and cooking for six hungry men who worked in the open air at reforesting. She did not quite know how people reforested, but she had a vague image in her mind of people going along with armfuls of trees which they stuck in holes.
Presently the breakfast was prepared, and Pennington banged briskly on a dishpan and howled "Chow!" in a way that was most incongruous. He really should have been a Rural Dean, by his looks and his gentle, almost clergymanly genial manners, and every time Marjorie looked at him in his rough clothes she got a shock because he wasn't one.
There was a long trestled table down the middle of the men's cabin, and each man, streaming out, picked up a plate and got it filled with food, and sat himself down in what seemed to be an appointed place. There were mugs for coffee, and Marjorie, under Pennington's direction, set them at all the places, and then went up and down filling them. There was a tin of condensed milk on the table, set there by Pennington's helpful hand.
She ran up and down, waiting on her charges, and feeling very much as if she were conducting a Sunday-school class picnic. The men, except Pennington and the other young Englishman, who never talked to the last day she knew him, seemed struck into terrified silence by their new cook.
And then a terrible thought came over her—it was rather a funny one, though, for the excitement of doing all this new work had stirred her up, rather than saddened her. She had never prepared any dinner-pails for them. She fled back into the cook-place precipitately, snatched the pails down from the shelf, and began feverishly spreading large biscuits with butter and bacon.
"There's marmalade in the big tin back of you," said Pennington's softly cultivated Oxford voice from the doorway. "And if you fill the small buckets with coffee they will take them, together with the rest of their dinners."
"But is that enough variety, just bacon and marmalade sandwiches?" she asked.
He nodded.
"There are tinned vegetables that you can give them to-night, if you wish."
So, he helping her, they got the last dinner-pail filled before the hungry horde poured out again. Each passed with a sheepish or courteous word of thanks, took his pail and went on. It did not occur to Marjorie till she saw Pennington go, eating as he went a large biscuit, that he must have cut his own meal very short in order to help her.
"What nice people there are in the world!" she breathed, sinking on the doorstep a minute to think and take breath.
She sat there longer than she really should, because the air was so crisp and lovely, and just as she was beginning to rise and go in to the summoning dishes, a small striped squirrel trotted across the grass and requested scraps with impudent wavings of his two small front paws. So she really had to stay and feed him. And after that there was a bird that actually seemed as if it was going to walk up to her, almost as the squirrel had done. He flew away just at the most exciting moment, but Marjorie didn't hold it against him. And then—why, then, she felt suddenly sleepy and lay down with her cloak swathed around her, under a tree, for just a minute. And when she looked at her wrist-watch it was eleven o'clock.
She felt guilty to the last degree. What would they say at the office to a young woman who took naps in the morning?
And then the blessed memory that there was no reason why she shouldn't do exactly as she pleased with her time, so long as the dishes were done after awhile, came to her.
"There's no clock in the forest," she thought, smiling drowsily; and lay serenely on the pine-needles for another half hour.
When she did go in, the quantity of dishes wasn't so terrific. There had been no courses. Each man had left behind him an entirely empty plate and mug and knife and fork; that was all. And Marjorie seemed to have more energy and delight in running about and doing things than she had ever known she possessed, in the heavy New York air. She washed the dishes and swept out the cabin with a gay good will that surprised herself. She tried to feel like Cinderella or Bluebeard's wife or some of the oppressed heroines who had loomed large in her past, but it wasn't to be done. After that she was so hungry—her own breakfast had been taken in bites, on the run—that she ate up all the remaining biscuits, after toasting them and making herself bacon sandwiches as she had for the men; quite forgetting that her own abode lay near, filled to repletion with stores of a quite superior kind. The bacon sandwiches and warmed-over coffee tasted better than anything she had ever eaten in her life.
And then there was a whole long afternoon ahead of her, before she had to do a solitary thing for the men's supper!
"I must have 'faculty'!" said Marjorie to herself proudly, thinking more highly of her own talents than she ever had before. The fact that as a filing-clerk she had not shone had made her rather meek about her own capacities. She had always taken it impudently for granted that she was attractive, because the fact had been, so to speak, forced on her. But there had been a very humble-minded feeling about her incapacity for a business life. Miss Kaplan, for instance, she of the exuberant emotions and shaky English, had a record for accuracy and speed in her particular line which was unsullied by a single lapse. And Lucille, lazy, luxury-loving Lucille, concealed behind her fluffinesses an undoubted and remorseless executive ability. Compared to them Marjorie had always felt herself a most useless person. That was why she always was meeker in office hours than out of them. And to find herself swinging this work, even for one meal, without a feeling of incapacity and unworthiness, made her very cheered indeed. The truth was, she was doing a thing she had a talent for.
"And I'm not tired!" she marveled. The change of air was responsible for that, of course.
She went back to her forgotten cabin, singing beneath her breath. It had a rather tousled air, but in her new enthusiasm she went through it like a whirlwind. She attacked her own room first, and created spotless order in it. Then she went at the living-room. Then—it was with a curious reluctance—she climbed the stairs to Francis's absurd little curtained balcony.
Francis, evidently, did not sleep so very well, or he had not that night at all events. The couch was very tossed, one pillow lay on the ground with a dent in its midst as if an angry hand had thrust it there, and, most unfairly, hit it after it was down. The covers were "every which way," as Marjorie said, picking them up and shaking them out with housewifely care. Francis's pajamas and a shabby brown terry bath-robe lay about the floor, the bathrobe in a ridiculously lifelike position with both its sleeves thrown forward over the pillow, as if it were trying to comfort it for all it had been through.
Everything had aired since morning, so she disguised the couch again in its slip-cover, put the cretonne covers back on the pillows, and the couch stood decorous and daytime-like again. She laid her hand on the pillow for a moment after she was all through, as if she were touching something she was sorry for.
"Poor Francis!" she said softly, smiling a little. "After all, he isn't so terribly much older than I am." She felt suddenly motherly toward him, and like being very kind. That maltreated pillow was so funny and boylike. "It isn't a bit like the storybooks," she mused. "In them you get all thrilled because a man is so masterful. Well," Marjorie tried to be truthful, even when she was alone with herself and the couch, "I guess I was thrilled, a little, when he carried me off that way. I certainly couldn't have gone if I'd known about the housework business. But now, the only part of him I like is when he isn't sitting on me. . . . I wonder if I'll ever be the same person, after all this?"
She never would. But, though she wondered, she did not really think that she was changing or would change. As a matter of fact, she had made more decisions, gone through more emotions, and become more of a woman in the little time since Francis had carried her off than in all her life before. The Marjorie of a year ago would not have answered the challenge of her husband to prove herself an honorable woman by taking over a long, hard, uncongenial task. She would have picked up her skirts and fled back to New York with Logan.
"I suppose it's the war," said Marjorie uncomfortably. "Dear me, I did think that when the war was over it would be over. And everything seems so real yet. I wonder if when I'm an old, old lady talking to Lucille's grandchildren I shall tell them, 'Ah, yes, my dears, your Grand-aunt Marjorie was a very different person in the days before the war! In those days you didn't have to be in earnest about anything. You didn't even to have any principles that showed. Life wasn't real and earnest a bit. People just went to tea-dances and talked flippantly, and some of the men had drinks. And everybody laughed a great deal, and it was decadent, and the end of an era, and a lot of shocking things—but it wasn't half as hard as living now, because there weren't standards, except when they were had by aunts and employers and such people. Ah, them was the days!' And the grand-nieces, or whatever relation they'll be to me, will look shocked, because they'll be children of their time, and it will still be fashionable to be earnest, and they'll say, 'Dear me, what a terrible time to have lived in!' And they'll be a little bit envious. And they'll say, 'And were even you frivolous?' And I'll sigh, and say, 'Yes, indeed, my dears! I married a worthy young man (as young men went then) in a thoughtless moment, and then when he came back I wouldn't stay married to him. But by that time the war was over, and we'd all stopped being flippant and frivolous. So I washed dishes for him three months before I went and left him.' And they'll commend me faintly for doing that much, and go away secretly shocked."
Marjorie was so cheered up by her own fervent imaginings by this time that she stopped to sit down on the arm of a chair, all by herself, and laugh out loud. And so Francis saw her, as he came in for something, and looked up, guided by her laugh. He had scarcely heard her laugh before for some time. She was perched birdlike on the arm of the chair at the foot of his couch, just to be glimpsed between the draperies of the balcony. She looked, to his eyes, like something too fragile and lovely to be real. And she was laughing! That did not seem real, either. She might have been pleasant, even cheerful, but this sprite, swinging there and laughing at nothing whatever, almost frightened him. For an awful moment he wondered if he had driven Marjorie mad. . . . He had been unkind to her—hard on her, he knew.
Before he could stop himself he had rushed up the stairs to the little balcony.
"Marjorie—Marjorie! What were you laughing about?" he demanded in what seemed to her a very surprising way.
"Why, don't you want me to laugh?" she demanded in her turn, very naturally.
"I—why—yes! But you frightened me, laughing all by yourself that way."
"Oh, I see!" said Marjorie, looking a little embarrassed. "People often look surprised when I forget, and do it on the street. I think about things, and then when they seem funny to me I laugh. Don't you ever have thoughts all by yourself that you laugh over, when you're alone?"
Francis shook his head. He had a good mind, and a quick one, but he did not use it as something to amuse himself with, as Marjorie did with hers. He used it to work with.
"I beg your pardon for startling you," he said. "But——"
"I know. It looked queer. I was just thinking how different everybody and everything is since the war. We're all so much more grown up, and responsible. And I was hearing myself talk to Lucille's grandchildren, and tell them all about the days before the war, when everybody said they just didn't care. . . . Aren't things different?"
Francis nodded.
"Yes, they're different. I don't know exactly how, but they are. And we are."
"Do you think you are?"
Francis sat down on the couch, looked at her, bright-eyed and grave, and nodded again.
"Yes. All the values are changed. At least they are for me and most of the men I came across. I don't think the women are so different; you see, the American women didn't have anything much to change them, except the ones who went over. We were in such a little while it didn't have time to go deep."
He meant no disparagement, but Marjorie flared up.
"You mean me—and Lucille—and all the rest!" she accused him. "You're quite wrong. That was just what I was telling Lucille's grandchildren. We are different. Why, do you think I would have thought I owed you anything—owed it to you to stay up here and drudge—before the war? I never thought about being good, particularly, or honorable, or owing things to people. Oh, I suppose I did, in a way, because I'd always been brought up to play fair. But never with the top of my mind. You know yourself, all anybody wanted was a good time. If anybody had told me, when I was seventeen—I was seventeen when the war started, wasn't I?—that I'd care more about standards than about fun, I'd have just thought they were lying, or they didn't know. And right and wrong have come to matter in the most curious way."
"I think perhaps," he answered her—they had quite forgotten that they were enemies by now—"that the war was in the air. Maybe the world felt that there wouldn't be much chance for good times for it—for our generation—again, and snatched at it. You know, for a good many years things won't be the same, even for us in America, who suffered less, perhaps, than any other nation in the world. Life's harder, and it will be."
"Oh, always?" demanded Marjorie. "You know, Francis, I always wanted good times worse than anything in the world, but that isn't saying I had them. I didn't. Won't I ever have any more? That few weeks when I raced around with you and Billy and Lucille was really the first time I'd been free and had fun with people I liked, ever since I'd been born. And—and I suppose it went to my head a little bit."
She looked up at him like a child who has been naughty and is sorry, and he looked over at her, his face going tense, as it did when he felt things.
"I don't think we were exactly free agents," he said musingly. "Something was pushing us. I'm not sorry . . . except that it was hardly fair to you——"
She leaned toward him impulsively, holding out her hand. He bent toward her, flushing. They were nearer than they had been since that day when his summons to war came. And then Fate—as Mr. Logan might have said—knocked at the door.
CHAPTER IX
The two on the balcony moved a little away from each other. Then Marjorie, coloring for no reason whatsoever, stepped down the toy stairs that wound like a doll's-house staircase, and went to the door.
It was Peggy O'Mara, no more and no less, but what a Peggy! She looked like an avenging goddess. But it was not at Marjorie that her vengeance was directed, it was plainly to be seen, for she swept the smaller girl to her bosom with one strong and emotional arm, and said, "You poor abused little lamb! I've come to tell you that I know all about it!"
Marjorie jerked herself away in surprise. For one thing, she had been very much interested in the conversation she had been carrying on with Francis, and had entirely forgotten that she might ever have had any claim to feel abused. For another thing, Peggy knew more than she should, if Logan had kept his promise.
"Won't—won't you come in?" she asked inadequately. "And please tell me what you mean."
"Mean! I mean I know all about it!" said Peggy, who was sixteen only, in spite of her goddess-build, and romantic.
She came in, nevertheless, holding tight to Marjorie as if she might faint, unaided; guided her to the downstairs couch, and sat down with her, holding tight to her still.
"Yes," said Marjorie, with a certain amount of coldness, considering that she was being regarded as an abused lamb, "you said that before. And now please tell me what it is that you know all about."
"Well, if that's the way you take being defended," said Peggy with a certain amount of temper, "I'll just go back the way I came!"
"But, Peggy, I don't know anything about it!" she pleaded. "Please tell me everything."
"There's nothing much to tell," said Peggy, quite chilly in her turn. But now she had more to face than Marjorie. Francis, militant and stern, strode down the steps and planted himself before the girls. He fixed his eye on Peggy in a way that she clearly was not used to stand up under, and said, "Out with it, Peggy!"
So Peggy, under his masculine eye, "made her soul."
"It's nothing that concerns you, Francis Ellison!" she began. "It's simply that I've learned how a man can treat a woman. And you—you that I've known since I was a child! And telling me fairy-tales of bold kidnapers and cruel husbands and all, and I never knowing that you were going to grow up and be one!"
Marjorie laughed—she couldn't help it, Peggy was so severe. Francis looked at her again in some surprise, and Peggy was plainly annoyed.
"I should say," said Francis with perfect calm, "that our honorable friend Mr. Logan had been confiding in you. His attitude is a little biased; however, let that pass. Just what did he say?"
"Just nothing at all, except that you were a charming young man, and he wished that he were as able to face the world and its problems as you," Peggy answered spiritedly. "None of your insinuations about his honor, please. And shame on you to malign a sick man!"
"Oh, is Mr. Logan sick?" asked Marjorie, forgetting other interests. She turned to Francis, forgetting their feud again, in a common and inexcusable curiosity. "Francis! Now we'll know what it really was that ailed him—the nervous spells, you know? I always told you it wasn't fits!"
"How do you know it isn't?" said Francis. "Peggy hasn't said."
"She wouldn't be so interested if it was," said Marjorie triumphantly.
"It takes an old and dear wife to stand that in a man."
They had no business to be deflected from Peggy and her temper by any such consideration; but it was a point which had occupied their letters for a year, off and on, and there had been bets upon it.
"Let me see, I suppose those wagers stand—was it candy, or a Hun helmet?" said Francis.
"Candy," said Marjorie. "But it was really the principle of the thing.
Ask her."
Francis turned back to Peggy, who was becoming angrier and angrier; for when you start forth to rescue any one, it is annoying, even as Logan found it, to have the rescue act as if it were nothing to her whether she was rescued or not.
"Now, what really does ail him, Pegeen?" he asked affectionately. "Did you see him, or don't you know?"
"Of course I saw him—am I not nursing him? And of course I know!
Poor man, the journey up here nearly killed him."
"How? It seemed like a nice journey to me," said Marjorie thoughtlessly.
"There's no use pretending you're happy," said Peggy relentlessly. "I know you're not. It's very brave, but useless."
"But has he fits?" demanded Marjorie with unmistakable intensity.
"He has not," said Peggy scornfully. "I don't know where you'd get the idea. He fainted this morning when he tried to get up. He didn't come down to breakfast, and we thought him tired out, and let him lie. But after awhile, perhaps at nine or so, we thought it unnatural that any one should be asleep so long. So I tiptoed up, because when you're as fat as mother it does wear you to climb more stairs than are needful. And there was the poor man, all dressed beautifully, even to his glasses with the black ribbon, lying across the bed, in a faint."
"Are you sure it was a faint?" the Ellisons demanded with one voice.
Peggy looked more scornful, if possible, than she had for some time.
"We had to bring him to with aromatic spirits of ammonia, and slapping his hands. And the doctor says it's his heart. That is, it isn't really his heart, but his nerves are so bad that they make some sort of a condition that it's just as bad as if he had heart-trouble really. Simulated heart-trouble, the doctor called it. You understand, he doesn't pretend, himself; his heart makes his nerves pretend, as well as I can make it out. Sure it must be dreadful to have nerves that act that way to you. I wonder what nerves feel like, anyway."
Peggy herself was getting off the topic, through her interest in the subject.
"But how did you find out that I was beating Marjorie?" inquired
Francis calmly, pulling her back.
She shot a furious glance at him.
"I wish you hadn't reminded me. I'd forgotten all about hating you for your horrid ways. It was just before he came to. He thought he was talking to you, and he said, 'You had no right to force her to do that work, Ellison, it will kill her.'"
"And was that all?" asked Marjorie.
"Wasn't that enough? And I ask you, Marjorie Ellison, isn't it true? Hasn't Francis forced you to come over here and do his cooking for him? Oh, Francis, I can't understand it in you," said poor Peggy, looking up at him appealingly. "You that were always so tender and kind with every one, to make a poor little thing like Marjorie work at cooking and cleaning for great rough men."
Francis had colored up while she spoke. One hand, behind his back, was clenching and unclenching nervously. He was fronting the two girls, but turned a little away from Marjorie and toward Peggy, so Marjorie could see it. Aside, from that he was perfectly quiet, and so far as any one could see, entirely unmoved. Only Marjorie knew he was not unmoved. That dark, thin, clenching hand—she had seen it before, restless and betraying, and she knew it meant that Francis was angry or unhappy. She felt curiously out of it all. She had made up her mind once and for all to go through with her penance, if one could call it that. Her mind was so unsettled and hard to make up that, once made up on this particular point, she felt it would be more trouble to stop than to go on. She leaned a little back against Peggy's guarding arm, and let the discussion flow on by her.
"Marjorie is free to go at any time; she knows that," he said.
Marjorie looked at him full. She said nothing whatever. But Peggy's
Irish wit jumped at the right solution.
"Yes, free to go, no doubt, but with what kind of a string to it?" she demanded triumphantly. "I'll wager it's like the way mother makes me free of things. 'Oh, sure ye can smoke them little cigarette things if ye like—but if ye do it's out of my door ye'll go!'"
Marjorie thought it was time to take a hand here. Francis was standing there, still, not trying to answer Peggy. He seemed to Marjorie pitifully at their mercy; why, she did not know, for he had neither said nor looked anything but the utmost sternness. And Marjorie herself knew that he was not being kind or fair—that he had not been, in his exaction. Still she looked at that hand, moving like a sentient thing, and spoke.
"Peggy, some day I'll tell you all about it, or Francis will. You and Francis have been friends for a long, long time, and I don't want you to be angry with him because of me—just a stranger. And for the present, I can tell you only this, that Francis is right, I am doing this of my own free will. You are a darling to come and care about what happens to me."
Peggy was softened at once. She pulled Marjorie to her and gave her a sounding kiss.
"And you're a darling, too, and you're not a stranger—don't we love you for Francis's sake—oh, there, and I was forgetting! I suppose I'm not to be down on you, Francis. But I couldn't help thinking things were queer. It's not the customary way to let your bride spend her honeymoon, from all I've heard. Oh, and it's five o'clock, and it takes an hour and a half to get back, though I borrowed the priest's housekeeper's bicycle."
She sprang up, dropping from her lap the bundle of aprons which
Marjorie had waited for.
"Mind, Francis, I've not forgiven you yet," she called back. "When poor Mr. Logan is better I'll have the whole story out of him, or my name's not Margaret O'Mara."
She was on her bicycle and away before they could answer her.
"And it's time I went over to the cook-shed," said Marjorie evenly, rising, too, and beginning to unfasten the bundle of aprons. They were a little hard to unfasten, from the too secure knots Mrs. O'Mara had made, and she dropped down again, bending intently over them to get them free. Suddenly they were pushed aside, and Francis had flung himself down by her, with his head on her knees, holding her fast.
"Oh, Marjorie, Marjorie!" he said. "Don't stay. I can't bear to have you acting like this—like an angel. I've been unfair and unkind—it didn't need Peggy to tell me that. Go on away from me. And forgive me, if you can, some time."
She looked down at the black head on her knees. It was victory, then—of a sort. And suddenly her perverse heart hardened.
"Please get up, Francis," she said in the same cold and even voice she had used before. "I haven't time for this sort of thing; it's time I went over and got the men their supper. They'll be ready for it at six, Pennington said."
He rose quietly and stood aside, while she took off the apron of Mrs. O'Mara's that she had been making shift with, and put one of the new ones on in its place, and went out of their cabin. She never looked back. She went swiftly and straight to the cook-shed and began work on the evening meal. There was a feeling of triumph in her heart. And nothing on earth would tempt her to go now. Francis was beginning to feel his punishment. And she wasn't through with him yet.
She found an oven which sat on top of the burners, and had just managed to lift it into its place when Pennington walked leisurely in behind her.
"I had to come back to get your husband," he explained, "and I thought
I'd see if you were in any troubles. Let me set that straight for you."
He adjusted it as it should be, and lingered to tell her anything else she might wish to know.
"I'm going to give them codfish cakes for breakfast," she confided to him, "a great many! But what on earth can I have for their dinners?"
"There is canned corn beef hash," he suggested. "That would do all right for to-night. Or you might have fish."
"Where would I get it?"
"Indians. They come by with strings of fish to sell, often. I think I can go out and send one your way."
"You speak as if there were Indians around every corner," she said.
"No-o, not exactly," he answered her slowly. "But the truth is that I saw one, with a string of fish, crossing up from the stream, not long ago. As I was riding and he walking, I think it likely that I shall intercept him on my way back. That is, if you want the fish."
"Oh, indeed, I do," she assured him eagerly. "That is—do you think the Indian—he won't hurt me, will he? And do you think he would clean them for me?"
"I think I can arrange that with him," Pennington, who was rapidly assuming the shape of a guardian angel to Marjorie, assured her.
"And now I must go and tell your husband that he's wanted down where the men are."
"Thank you," she said, looking up at his plump, tanned, rather quaint face—so like, as she always thought, a middle-aged rector's in an English novel—with something grotesque and yet pathetic about it. "I don't know what I'd do without your help. In a day or so I may get to the point where I'll be very clever, and very independent."
She smiled up at him, and he looked down at her with what she characterized in her own mind as his motherly expression. "You're such a little thing!" he said as if he couldn't help it. Then, after a hasty last inquiry as to whether there was anything more he could do, he went off in search of Francis.
She looked after him with a feeling of real affection.
"He's the nearest I have to a mother!" she said to herself whimsically, as she addressed herself to the preparation of the evening meal. She had conceived the brilliant plan of doing the men's lunches, where it was possible, the night before. In this way, she thought, though it might take a little more time in the afternoon, it would make things easier in the mornings. Such an atmosphere of hurry as she had lived in that morning, while it had been rather fun for once, would be too tiring in the long run, she knew. And the run would be long—three months.
The Indian came duly with the fish, all cleaned and ready to fry. She was baking beans in the oven for to-morrow's luncheons. So she baked the potatoes, too, and hunted up some canned spinach, and then—having miscalculated her time—conceived the plan of winning the men's hearts with a pudding. She was sure Pierre's cookery had never run to such delicacies. And even then there was time to spare. The men were late, or something had happened. So she looked to be sure that there was nothing more she could do, and then strayed off to the edges of the woods, looking for flowers. She found clumps of bloodroot, great anemone-flowers that she picked by the handful. There were some little blue flowers, also, whose name she did not know; and sprays of wintergreen berries and long grasses. Greatly daring, she put one of the low, flat vases she had found in her cabin in the center of the men's trestle-table, and filled it with her treasure-trove. Then, a little tired, she sat down by the table herself, resting for a moment before the drove should come home.