nded Marjorie coolly.

"Oh, no," the Englishman answered. He seemed deeply shocked at the
idea. "They have a cook. By the way, Mrs. Ellison, it is only poetic
justice that you should have taken over this job; for do you know that
the reason Pierre gave for his sudden flight in the direction of
marriage was that you and Mr. Ellison looked so happy he got lonesome
for a wife!"

"Good gracious!" gasped Marjorie before she remembered herself. . . .
"That is--I didn't know our happiness showed as far off as that."

She did not dare to look at Francis, whom she divined to be standing
rigidly behind her. "And now could you show me the place where I have
to cook, and the things to cook with?"

Mr. Pennington--Harmsworth-Pennington was his veritable name, as she
learned later--took the hint and swept her immediately off to the
lean-to. The _tout-ensemble_ was not terrifying. It consisted of a
kerosene stove of two burners, another one near it for emergencies, a
wooden cupboard full of heavy white dishes, and a lower part to it
where the stores were.

"The hardest thing for you will be getting up early," he said
sympathetically. "The men have to have breakfast and be out of here by
seven o'clock. And they take dinner-pails with them. Then there's
nothing to get till the evening meal."

"Of course there'd be tidying to do," suggested Marjorie avidly, for
she hated disorder, and saw a good deal about her.

"If you had the strength for it," said Pennington doubtfully.

"Francis thinks I have," she answered with a touch of wickedness.

Francis, behind her, continued to say nothing at all.

She spent five minutes more in the lean-to with the opportune
Pennington, and gathered from him, finally, that next morning there
would have to be a big pot of oatmeal cooked, and bacon enough fried
for five hungry men. Griddle cakes, flapjacks, or breadstuff of some
kind had to be produced also; coffee in a pot that looked big enough
for a hotel, with condensed milk, and a meal apiece for their
dinner-hour.

"I just give 'em anything cold that's left over," said Pennington
unsympathetically. "There has to be lots of it, that's all."

Marjorie cried out in horror.

"Oh, they mustn't have those cold! But--do they have to have all that
every morning?"

"Great Scott, no!" exclaimed the scandalized Pennington. "Some days
they just have flapjacks, and some days just bacon and eggs and bread.
And sometimes oatmeal extra. I