ing them. There
was a tin of condensed milk on the table, set there by Pennington's
helpful hand.

She ran up and down, waiting on her charges, and feeling very much as
if she were conducting a Sunday-school class picnic. The men, except
Pennington and the other young Englishman, who never talked to the last
day she knew him, seemed struck into terrified silence by their new
cook.

And then a terrible thought came over her--it was rather a funny one,
though, for the excitement of doing all this new work had stirred her
up, rather than saddened her. She had never prepared any dinner-pails
for them. She fled back into the cook-place precipitately, snatched
the pails down from the shelf, and began feverishly spreading large
biscuits with butter and bacon.

"There's marmalade in the big tin back of you," said Pennington's
softly cultivated Oxford voice from the doorway. "And if you fill the
small buckets with coffee they will take them, together with the rest
of their dinners."

"But is that enough variety, just bacon and marmalade sandwiches?" she
asked.

He nodded.

"There are tinned vegetables that you can give them to-night, if you
wish."

So, he helping her, they got the last dinner-pail filled before the
hungry horde poured out again. Each passed with a sheepish or
courteous word of thanks, took his pail and went on. It did not occur
to Marjorie till she saw Pennington go, eating as he went a large
biscuit, that he must have cut his own meal very short in order to help
her.

"What nice people there are in the world!" she breathed, sinking on the
doorstep a minute to think and take breath.

She sat there longer than she really should, because the air was so
crisp and lovely, and just as she was beginning to rise and go in to
the summoning dishes, a small striped squirrel trotted across the grass
and requested scraps with impudent wavings of his two small front paws.
So she really had to stay and feed him. And after that there was a
bird that actually seemed as if it was going to walk up to her, almost
as the squirrel had done. He flew away just at the most exciting
moment, but Marjorie didn't hold it against him. And then--why, then,
she felt suddenly sleepy and lay down with her cloak swathed around
her, under a tree, for just a minute. And when she looked at her
wrist-watch it was eleven o'clock.

She felt guilty to the last degree. What would they say at the office
to a young woman who to