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.”

“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.”

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?”

“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!”

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!”

“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.

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 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.”

“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 manœuver, 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.

“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.”

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.

“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?

“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.”

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 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.”

“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.”

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.

“Mother Jess,” she said, using unconsciously the Cameron term; “Mother Jess, I don’t like death.”

“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.

“I feel like a picnic,” said Mother Jess, “a genuine all-day-in-the-woods picnic.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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.”

“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.

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!

“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.

“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!”

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.

“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.

“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?”

“Aren’t you afraid it may rain to-morrow?” she asked.

“No, indeed! It never rains on things Mother plans.”

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.

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?

“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.

“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.”

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.”

“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.

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?”

“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.

“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.”

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.

“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.”

“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.

“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.”

“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.

“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.”

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!”

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.”

“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.

“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.

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?

“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.