ave picked bushels
there then. Now they're all cleaned out."

"But why? Did people dig them up?"

"Picked'em too close. Some things won't stand being cleaned up the way
most people clean up flowers in the woods. They're free, and nobody's
responsible."

In spite of her thoughts Elliott dimpled. "I think it is quite safe to
take me."

He grinned. "Maybe that's why I do it."

It was very pleasant, tramping along with Bruce in the bright day;
pleasant, too, leaving the sunshine for the spicy coolness of the
woods, and climbing up, up, among great tree-trunks and mossy rocks
and trickling mountain brooks. Or it would have been pleasant, if
one could only have forgotten the reason that underlay their
journey. But when they had reached Bruce's secret spot and were
cutting the wiry brown stems, and packing together carefully the
spreading, many-fingered fronds so as not to break the delicate
ferns, that undercurrent of numb consternation reasserted itself. Like
Priscilla, Elliott felt a little shocked at the brightness of the
sunshine, the blueness of the sky, and the beauty of the fern-filled
glade.

"It was dreadful for him to be killed before he had done anything!" At
last the words so long burning in her heart reached the tip of her
tongue.

"Yes." Bruce's voice was sober. "It sure was hard."

[Illustration: Cutting the wiry brown stems in the fern-filled glade.]

"I should think his people would feel as though they couldn't _stand_
it!" Elliott declared. "If he had got to France--but now it is just a
hideous, hideous waste!"

Bruce hesitated. "I suppose that is one way of looking at it."

"Why, what other way could there be?" She stared at him in surprise.
"He was just learning to fly. He hadn't done anything, had he?"

"No, he hadn't done anything. But what he died for is just the same as
though he had got across, isn't it, and had downed forty Huns?"

She continued to stare fixedly at the boy for a full minute. "Why,
yes," she said at last, very slowly; "yes, I suppose it is." Curiously
enough, the whole thing looked better from that angle.

For a long time she was silent, cutting and tying up ferns.

"How did you happen to think of that?"

"To think of what?" Bruce was tying his own ferns.

"What you said about--about _what_ this Ted Gordon died for."

It was Bruce's turn to look surprised. "I didn't think of anything.
It's just a fact, isn't it?"

Then he began to load himself with ferns. Elli