done."

If Elliott hadn't been so miserable, she would have laughed. Stannard
had hit himself off very well, she thought. He had his good points,
too. Not once had he reminded her that she hadn't intended to spend
her summer on a farm. But she was too unhappy to tease him as she
might have done at another time. She was still bewildered and inclined
to resent the trick life had played her. The prospect didn't look any
better on close inspection than it had at first; rather worse, if
anything. Imagine her, Elliott Cameron pitching hay! Not that any one
had asked her to. But how could a person live for six weeks with these
people and not do what they did? Such was Elliott's code. Delightful
people, too. But she didn't wish to pitch hay and she loathed washing
dishes. There was something so messy about dish-washing, ordinary
dish-washing; milk-pans were different.

Then suddenly Elliott Cameron did a strange thing. By this time she
had shaken off Stannard and had betaken herself and her disgust to the
edge of the woods. She was so very miserable that she didn't know
herself and she knew herself less than ever in this next act. Alone in
the woods, as she thought, with only moss underfoot and high green
boughs overhead, Elliott lifted her foot and deliberately and with
vehemence stamped it. "I don't like things!" she whispered, a little
shocked at her own words. "I don't _like_ things!"

Then she looked up and met the amused eyes of Bruce Fearing.

For a minute the hot color flooded the girl's face. But she seized the
bull by the horns. "I am cross," she said, "frightfully cross!" And
she looked so engagingly pretty as she said it that Bruce thought he
had never seen so attractive a girl.

"Anything in particular gone wrong with the universe?"

"Everything, with my part of it." What possessed her, she wondered
afterward, to say what she said next? "I never wanted to come here."

"That so? We've been thinking it rather nice."

In spite of herself, she was mollified. "It isn't quite that, either,"
she explained. "I've only just discovered the real trouble, myself.
What makes me so mad isn't altogether the fact that I didn't want to
come up here. It's that I hadn't any choice. I _had_ to come."

The boy's eyes twinkled. "So that's what's bothering you, is it? Cheer
up! You had the choice of _how_ you'd come, didn't you?"

"How?"

"Yes. Sometimes I think that's all the choice they give us in this
world. It's all I'v