an-to, leaving him to
follow.

Pennington's kind and motherly face was peering anxiously out. It came
to Marjorie that she was going to have a good deal of trouble keeping
him from taking too much work off her shoulders. Some men have the
maternal instinct strongly developed, and of such, she was quite sure,
was Pennington. She wondered what he was doing so far from England,
and what she could do to pay him back for his friendliness--for she
felt instinctively that she had a friend in him.

Sure enough, he had started the big pot of water boiling for the
oatmeal, and was salting it as she entered.

"Oh, let me!" she cried, and before his doubting eyes she began to stir
the oatmeal in.

"I suppose there never was a double boiler big enough," she began
doubtfully. "It would save so much trouble."

"We might make one out of a dishpan, perhaps, swung inside this pot,"
he said.

"And I always thought Englishmen weren't resourceful!" she commented,
smiling at him. "We'll try it to-morrow."

Meanwhile, having stirred in all the oatmeal necessary, she lowered the
burners a little and began on the coffee. Then she saw the point of
the other stove, for she found she needed it for the bacon and
biscuits. The actual work was not so complicated; the thing that
appalled her was Pennington's insistence on the awful amount of food
needed for the six men and herself. But, of course, as she reminded
herself, there _was_ a difference between cooking for Cousin Anna and
herself on the maid's day out, or for Lucille and herself, and cooking
for six hungry men who worked in the open air at reforesting. She did
not quite know how people reforested, but she had a vague image in her
mind of people going along with armfuls of trees which they stuck in
holes.

Presently the breakfast was prepared, and Pennington banged briskly on
a dishpan and howled "Chow!" in a way that was most incongruous. He
really should have been a Rural Dean, by his looks and his gentle,
almost clergymanly genial manners, and every time Marjorie looked at
him in his rough clothes she got a shock because he wasn't one.

There was a long trestled table down the middle of the men's cabin, and
each man, streaming out, picked up a plate and got it filled with food,
and sat himself down in what seemed to be an appointed place. There
were mugs for coffee, and Marjorie, under Pennington's direction, set
them at all the places, and then went up and down fill