Acting Guardian
while I'm gone. You're all to do just as she tells you, and obey her
just as if she were I. I see that Tom's got the buggy all harnessed up.
It's lucky they were able to save their wagons and their horses, isn't
it?"

"What are you going to do in Cranford?" asked Dolly. "Won't you tell us,
Miss Eleanor?"

"No, I won't, Dolly," said Eleanor, laughing. "If I come back with good
news--and I certainly hope I shall--you'll enjoy it all the more if it's
a surprise, and if I don't succeed, why, no one will be disappointed
except me."

And then with a wave of her hand, she sprang into the waiting buggy and
drove off with Tom Pratt holding the reins, and looking very proud of
his pretty passenger.

"Well, I don't know what it's all about, but we know just what we're
supposed to do, girls," said Margery. "So let's get to work. Bessie, you
and Dolly might start picking out the boards that aren't too badly
burned."

"All right," said Dolly. "Come on, Bessie!"

"I'll pace off the distance to see how big a place we need to make,"
said Margery. "Mrs. Pratt, how far is it to a part of the woods that
wasn't burned? Miss Mercer thought we could get some green branches
there for bedding."

"Not very far," said Mrs. Pratt, with a sigh. "That's what seemed so
hard! When we drove along this morning we came quite suddenly to a patch
along the road on both sides where the fire hadn't reached, and it made
us ever so happy."

"Oh, what a shame!" said Margery. "I suppose you thought you'd come to
the end of the burned part?"

"I hoped so--oh, how I did hope so!" said poor Mrs. Pratt. "But then,
just before we came in sight of the place, we saw that the fire had
changed its direction again, and then we knew that our place must have
gone."

"That's very strange, isn't it?" said Margery. "I wonder why the fire
should spare some places and not others?"

"It seems as if it were always that way in a big fire," said Mrs. Pratt.
"I suppose there'd been some cutting around that patch of woods that
wasn't burned. And only last year a man was going to buy the wood in
that wood lot of ours on the other side of the road, and clear it. If he
had, maybe the fire wouldn't ever have come near us, at all."

"Well, we'll have to think about what did happen, not what we wish had
happened, Mrs. Pratt," said Margery, cheerfully. "The thing to do now is
to make the best of a bad business. I'm going to send four or five of
the girls to