posure, a pair of blue eyes, rather pale in
colour, to which the sunburn of brow and cheek gave a singular
brilliance, and a well-cut, determined mouth. The shoulders were those of
an athlete, but on the whole the figure was lightly and slenderly built,
making an impression rather of grace and elasticity than of exceptional
strength.

"You would like to see the camp?" he said, looking at Rachel.

"Aren't you too busy to show it?"

"Not at all. I am not wanted just now. Let me help you over those logs."
He held out his hand.

"Oh, thank you, I don't want any help," said Rachel a little scornfully.
He smiled in approving silence, and she followed his lead, leaping and
scrambling over the piles of wood, with a deer's sureness of foot, till
he invited her to stop and watch the timber girls at their measuring. As
the two visitors approached, land-women and forest-women eyed each other
with friendly looks, but without speech. For talk, indeed, the business
in hand was far too strenuous. The logs were coming in fast; there must
be no slip in measurement or note. The work was hard, and the women doing
it had been at it all day. But on the whole, what a comely and energetic
group, with the bright eyes, the clear skins, the animation born of open
air and exercise.

"They can't talk to you now!" said Mrs. Fergusson in Janet's ear, amid
the din of the engines, "but they'll talk at tea. And there's a dance
to-night."

Janet looked round the wild glen in wonder.

"Who come?"

"Oh, there's an Air Force camp half a mile away--an Army Service camp on
the other side. The officers come--some of them--every Saturday. We take
down the partitions in our huts. You can't think what pretty frocks the
girls put on! And we dance till midnight."

"And you've no difficulty with the men working in the camp?"

"You mean--how do they treat the girls?" laughed Mrs. Fergusson. "They're
_charming_ to the girls! Chivalrous, kind, everything they should be. But
then," she added proudly, "my girls are the pick--educated women all of
them. I could trust them anywhere. And Captain Ellesborough--you won't
get any mischief going on where he is."

Meanwhile the captain, well out of earshot of Mrs. Fergusson's praise,
was explaining the organization of the camp to Rachel as they slowly
climbed the hill, on the opposite side from that by which she and Janet
had descended.

"Which works hardest, I wonder?" she said at last, as they paused to look
do