dashed into the big red barn two minutes before a
thunder-shower, and Laura, freshly tubbed and laundered, was winding
her long black braids around her shapely little head. Elliott sat on
the bed and watched her.

"Aren't you glad it's done?" she asked.

"The haying? Oh, yes, I'm always glad when we have it safely in. But I
love it."

"Really? It isn't work for girls."

"No? Then once a year I'll take a vacation from being a girl. But that
doesn't hold now, you know. Everything is work for girls that girls
can do, to help win this war."

"To help win the war?" echoed Elliott, and blankly and suddenly shut
her mouth. Why, she supposed it did help, after all! But it was their
work, the kind of thing they had always done, up here at the Cameron
Farm; only, as Bruce had assured her, the girls hadn't done much of
it. Was that what Bruce had meant, too?

"Why did you suppose we put so much more land under cultivation this
year than we ever had before, with less help in sight?" Laura
questioned. "Just for fun, or for the money we could get out of it?"

"I hadn't thought much about it," said Elliott. She was thinking now.
Had she been a bit of a slacker? She loathed slackers.

"I never thought of it as war work," she said. "Stupid, wasn't I?"

Laura put the last hair-pin in place. "Just thought of it as our job,
did you? So it is, of course. But when your job happens to be war work
too--well, you just buckle down to it extra hard. I've never been so
thankful as this year and last that we have the farm. It gives every
one of us such a splendid chance to feel we're really counting in this
fight--the boys over there and in camp, the rest of us here." Laura's
dark eyes were beginning to shine. "Oh, I wouldn't be anywhere but on
a farm for anything in the wide world, unless, perhaps, somewhere in
France!"

She stopped suddenly, put down the hand-mirror with which she was
surveying her back hair, and blushed. "There!" she said, "I forgot all
about the fact that you weren't born on a farm, too. But then, you can
share ours for a year, so I'm not going to apologize for a word I've
said, even if I have been bragging because I'm so lucky."

Bragging because she was lucky! And Laura meant it. There was not the
ghost of a pose in her frank, downright young pride. Her cousin felt
like a person who has been walking down-stairs and tries to step off a
tread that isn't there. Elliott's own cheeks reddened as she thought
of the pa