ott wouldn't have
supposed any one could carry as many as Bruce shouldered; he had great
bunches in his hands, too.

"You look like a walking fernery," she said.

"Birnam Wood," he quoted and for a minute she couldn't think what he
meant. "Better let me take some of those on the ground," he said.

"No, indeed! I am going to do my share."

Quietly he possessed himself of two of her bunches. "That's your
share. It will be heavy enough before we get home."

It was heavy, though not for worlds would Elliott have mentioned the
fact. She helped Bruce put the ferns in water, and she went out at
night and sprinkled them to keep them fresh; but she had an excuse
ready when Laura asked if she would like to go over to the little
white-spired church on the hill and help arrange them.

Nothing would have induced her to attend the services, either, though
afterward she wished that she had. There seemed to have been something
so high and fine and--yes--so cheerful about them, so martial and
exalted, that she wished she had seen for herself what they were like.
In Elliott's mind gloom had always been inseparably linked with a
funeral, gloom and black clothes. Whereas Laura and her mother and
Gertrude and Priscilla wore white. A good many things at the Cameron
farm were very odd.

It was after every one had gone to bed and the lights were out that
Elliott lay awake in her little slant-ceilinged room and worried and
worried about Father, three thousand miles away. He wasn't an aviator,
it was true, but in France wasn't the land almost as unsafe as the
air? She had imagined so many things that might perfectly easily
happen to him that she was on the point of having a little weep all by
herself when Aunt Jessica came in. Did she know that Elliott was
homesick? Aunt Jessica sat down on the bed, as she had sat that first
night, and talked about comforting, commonplace things--about the new
kittens, and how soon the corn might be ripe, and what she used to do
when she was a girl in Washington. Elliott got hold of her hand and
wound her own fingers in and out among Aunt Jessica's fingers, but in
the end she spoke out the thing that was uppermost in her mind.

"Mother Jess," she said, using unconsciously the Cameron term; "Mother
Jess, I don't like death."

She said it in a small, wabbly voice, because she felt very strongly
and she wasn't used to talking about such things. But she had to say
it. Though if the room hadn't been dark,