“You don’t want to have much to do with that fellow,” said Stannard, when Bruce Fearing had gone on about whatever business he had in hand.

“Why not?” Elliott’s tone was short. She had wanted to hear what Bruce was going to say.

“Oh, he is all right, enough, I guess, but nobody knows where he came from. He and that Pete brother of his are no relations of ours, or of Aunt Jessica’s either.”

“How does he happen to be living here, then?”

“Search me. Some kind of a pick-up, I gathered. Nobody talks much about it. They take him as a matter of course. All 64 right enough for them, if they want to, but they really ought to warn strangers. A fellow would think he was—er—all right, you know.”

Stannard’s words made Elliott very uncomfortable. She thought the reason they disquieted her was that she had rather liked Bruce Fearing, and now to have him turn out a person whom she couldn’t be as friendly with as she wished was disconcerting. It was only another point in her indictment of life on the Cameron farm; one couldn’t tell whom one was knowing. But she determined to sound Laura, which would be easy enough, and Stannard’s charge might prove unfounded.

But sounding Laura was not easy, chiefly for the reason Stannard had shrewdly deduced, that the Robert Camerons took Peter and Bruce Fearing in quite as matter-of-fact a way as they took themselves. Laura even failed to discover that she was being sounded.

“Who is this ‘Pete’ you’re always talking about?” Elliott asked.

“Bruce’s older brother—I almost said ours.” The two girls were skimming currants, Laura with the swift skill of accustomed fingers, Elliott more slowly. “He is perfectly fine. I wish you could know him.”

“I gathered he was Bruce’s brother.”

“He’s not a bit like Bruce. Pete is short and dark and as quick as a flash. You’d know he would make a splendid aviator. There was a letter in the ‘Upton News’ last night from an Upton doctor who is over there, attached now to our boys’ camp; did you see it? He says Bob and Pete are ‘the acknowledged aces’ of their squadron. That shows we must have missed some of their letters. The last one from Bob was written just after he had finished his training.”

“This—Pete went from here?”

“He and Bob were in Tech together, 66 juniors. They enlisted in Boston, and they’ve kept pretty close tabs on each other ever since. They had their training over here in the same camps. In France, Pete got into spirals first, ‘by a fluke,’ as he put it; Bob was unlucky with his landings. But, some way or other, Bob seems to have beaten him to the actual fighting. Now they’re in it together.” And Laura smiled and then sighed, and the nimble fingers stopped work for a minute, only to speed faster than ever.

“I haven’t read you any of their letters, have I? Or Sid’s either? (Sidney is my twin, you know. He is at Devens.) But I will. If anything, Pete’s are funnier than Bob’s. Both the boys have an eye to the jolly side of things. Sometimes you wouldn’t think there was anything to flying but a huge lark, by the way they write. But there was one letter of Pete’s (it was to Mother), written from their first training-camp in France after 67 one of the boys’ best friends had been killed. Pete was evidently feeling sober, but oh, so different from the way any one would have felt about such a thing before the war began! There was plenty of fun in the letter, too, but toward the end, Pete told about this Jim Stone’s death, and he said: ‘It has made us all pretty serious, but nobody’s blue. Jim was a splendid fellow, and a chap can’t think he has stopped as quick as all that. Mother Jess, do you remember my talking to you one Sunday after church, freshman vacation, about the things I didn’t believe in? Why didn’t you tell me I was a fool? You knew it then, and I know it now.’ That’s Pete all over. It made Mother and me very happy.”

Elliott felt rather ashamed to continue her probing. “Have they always lived with you,” she asked, “the Fearings?”

“Oh, yes, ever since I can remember. Isn’t Bruce splendid? I don’t know how 68 we could have got on at all this summer without Bruce.”

Then Elliott gave up. If a mystery existed, either Laura didn’t know of it, or she had forgotten it, or else she considered it too negligible to mention.

The girl found that for some reason she did not care to ask Stannard the source of his information. Would Bruce himself prove communicative? There could be no harm in finding out. Besides, it would tease Stannard to see her talking with “that fellow,” and Elliott rather enjoyed teasing Stannard. And didn’t she owe him something for a dictatorial interruption?

The thing would require manoeuvering. You couldn’t talk to Bruce Fearing, or to any one else up here, whenever you felt like it; he was far too busy. But on the hill at sunset Elliott found her chance.

“I think Aunt Jessica,” she remarked, 69 “is the most wonderful woman I’ve ever seen.”

A glow lit up Bruce’s quiet gray eyes. “Mother Jess,” he said, “is a miracle.”

“She is so terrifically busy, and yet she never seems to hurry; and she always has time to talk to you and she never acts tired.”

“She is, though.”

“I suppose she must be, sometimes. I like that name for her, ‘Mother Jess.’ Your—aunt, is she?”

“Oh, no,” said Bruce, simply. “I’ve no Cameron or Fordyce blood in me, or any other pedigreed variety. My corpuscles are unregistered. She and Father Bob took Pete and me in when I was a baby and Pete was a mere toddler. I was born in the hotel down in the town there,—Am I boring you?”

“No, indeed!” Elliott had the grace to blush at the ease with which she was carrying on her investigation.

He wondered why she flushed, but went on quietly. “Our own mother died there in the hotel when I was a week old and we didn’t seem to have any kin. At least, they never showed up. Mother was evidently a widow; Mother Jess got that from her belongings. She stopped overnight at Highboro, and I was born there. She hadn’t told any one in the hotel where she was going. Registered from Boston, but nobody could be found in Boston who knew of her. The authorities were going to send Pete and me to some kind of a capitalized Home, when Mother Jess stepped in. She hadn’t enough boys, so she said. Bob and Laura and Sid were on deck. Henry and Tom came along later. Fordyce was the one that died; he’d just slipped out. Mother Jess was feeling lonely, I guess. Anyway, she took us two; said she thought we’d be better off on the farm than in a Home and she needed us—bless her! Do you wonder 71 Pete and I swear by the Camerons?”

“No,” said Elliott. “Indeed I don’t.” She had what she had been angling for, in good measure, but she rather wished she hadn’t got it, after all. “Haven’t you had any clue in all these years as to who your people were?”

“Not the slightest. I’m willing to let things rest as they are.”

“Yes, of course,” thought Elliott, “but—” She let it go at “but.” Oughtn’t somebody, as Stannard said, to have warned her? These boys’ people might have been very common persons, not at all like Camerons. The fact that no relatives appeared proved that, didn’t it? Every one who was any one at all had a family. Bruce did not look common: his gray eyes and his broad forehead and his keen, thin face were almost distinguished, and his manners were above criticism. But one never could tell. And hadn’t he been brought up by Camerons? The very 72 openness with which he had told his story had something fine about it. He, like Laura, seemed to see nothing in it to conceal.

Well, was there? Elliott could quite clearly imagine what Aunt Margaret, Stannard’s mother, would say to that question. She had never especially cared for Aunt Margaret. As Elliott looked at Bruce Fearing, one of the pillars of her familiar world began to totter. Actually, she could think of no particularly good reason why, when she had heard his story, she should proceed to shun him. His history simply didn’t seem to matter, except to make her sorry for him; and yet she couldn’t be really sorry for a boy who had been brought up by Aunt Jessica.

Perhaps the Cameron Farm atmosphere was already beginning to work.

“I think you and your brother had luck,” she said.

“I know we did,” answered Bruce.

Elliott turned the conversation. “I wish you could tell me what you were going to say, when we were interrupted yesterday, about a person’s having no choice except how he will do things—you having had only that kind of choice.”

“I remember,” said Bruce. “Well, for one thing, I suppose I could get grouchy, if I chose, over not knowing who my people were.”

“They may have been very splendid,” said Elliott.

Bruce smiled. “It’s not likely.”

“In that case,” she countered, “you have the satisfaction of not knowing who they were.”

“Exactly. But that’s rather a crawl, isn’t it? Of course, a fellow would like to know.”

The boy bent forward, and, with painstaking care, selected a blade from a tuft of grass growing between his feet. He nibbled a minute before he spoke again.

“See here, I’m going to tell you something I haven’t told a soul. I’m crazy to go to the war. Sometimes it seems as though I couldn’t stay home. When Pete’s letters come I have to go away somewhere quick and chop wood! Anything to get busy for a while.”

“Aren’t you too young? Would they take you?”

“Take me? You bet they’d take me! I’m eighteen. Don’t I look twenty?”

The girl’s eye ran critically over the strong young body, with its long, supple, sinewy lines. “Yes,” she nodded. “I think you do.”

“They’d take me in a minute, in aviation or anything else.”

“Then why don’t you?”

“Who’d help Father Bob through the farm stunts? Young Bob’s gone, and Pete and Sidney. They were always here for the summer work. Henry’s a fine lad, 75 but a boy still. Tom’s nothing but a boy, though he does his bit. As for the Women’s Land Army, it’s got up into these parts, but not in force. Father Bob can’t hire help: it’s not to be had. That’s why Mother Jess and the girls are going in so for farm work. They never did it before this year, except in sport. We have more land under cultivation this summer than ever before, and fewer hands to harvest it with. But Mother and the girls sha’n’t have to work harder than they’re doing now, if I can help it. Could I go off and leave them, after all they’ve done for me? But that’s not it, either—gratitude. They’re mine, Father Bob and Mother Jess are, and the rest; they’re my folks. You’re not exactly grateful to your own folks, you know. They belong to you. And you don’t leave what belongs to you in the lurch.”

“No,” said Elliott. With awakened 76 eyes she was watching Bruce. No boy had ever talked of such things to her before. “So you’re not going?”

“Not of my own will. Of course, if the war lasts and I’m drafted, or the help problem lightens up, it will be different. Pete’s gone. It was Pete’s right to go. He’s the elder.”

“But you are choosing,” Elliott cried earnestly. “Don’t you see? You’re choosing to stay at home and—” words came swiftly into her memory—“‘fight it out on these lines all summer.’”

Bruce’s smile showed that he recognized her quotation, but he shook his head. “Choosing? I haven’t any choice—except being decent about it. Don’t you see I can’t go? I can only try to keep from thinking about not going.”

“You being you,” said the girl, and she spoke as simply and soberly as Bruce himself, though her own warmth surprised her, “I see you can’t go. But was that all 77 you meant”—her voice grew ludicrously disappointed—“by a person’s having a choice only of how he will do a thing? There’s nothing to that but making the best of things!”

Bruce Fearing threw back his head and laughed heartily.

“You’re the funniest girl I’ve ever seen.”

“Then you can’t have seen many. But is there?”

“Perhaps not. Stupid, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she nodded, “I’m afraid it is. And frightfully old. I was hoping you were going to tell me something new and exciting.”

The boy chuckled again. “Nothing so good as that. Besides, I’ve a hunch the exciting things aren’t very new, after all.”

Elliott went to sleep that night, if not any happier, at least more interested. She had looked deep into the heart of a boy, different, it appeared, from any boy that 78 she had ever known; and something loyal and sturdy and tender she had seen there had stirred her. It was odd how well acquainted she felt with him; odd, too, how curious she was to know him better, even though he hadn’t the least idea who his grandfather had been. “Bother his grandfather!” Elliott chuckled to realize how such a sentiment would horrify Aunt Margaret. Grandfathers were very important to Aunt Margaret and Aunt Margaret’s children. Grandfathers had always seemed fairly important to Elliott herself until now. Was it their relative unimportance in the Robert Camerons’ estimation, or a pair of steady gray eyes, that had altered her valuation? The girl didn’t know and she was keen enough to know that she didn’t; keen enough, too, to perceive that the change in her estimation of grandfathers applied to a single case only and might be merely temporary.

However that might be, she was not 79 ready yet to do anything so inherently distasteful as make the best of what she didn’t like, especially when nobody but herself and two boys would know it. When one makes the best of things, one likes to do it to crowded galleries, that perceive what is going on and applaud. The Robert Camerons, Elliott was quite sure, wouldn’t applaud. They would take it as a matter of course, just as they took her as a matter of course. They were quite charming about it, as delightful hosts as one could wish—if only they lived differently!—but Elliott wasn’t used to being taken for granted. She might have been these new cousins’ own sort, for any difference she could detect in their actions. They didn’t seem to begin to understand her importance. Perhaps she wasn’t so important, after all. The doubt had never before entered her mind.

The fact was, of course, that among these busy, efficient people she was feeling 80 quite useless; and she didn’t like to appear incompetent when she knew herself to be, in her own line, a thoroughly able person. But it irked her to think that she had been forced into a position where in self-defense she must either acquire a kind of efficiency she didn’t want or do without. At the same time it troubled her lest this reluctance become apparent. For they were all loves and she wouldn’t hurt their feelings for worlds. And she did wish them to admire her. But she had a feeling that they didn’t altogether, not even Priscilla and Bruce.

Nevertheless, the next day when Laura asked whether she would take her book out to the hay-field or stay where she was on the porch, Elliott looked up from “Lorna Doone” and said, with the prettiest little coaxing air, “If I go, will you let me pitch hay?” And Laura answered as lightly, “Certainly.” “I don’t believe you,” said 81 Elliott. “You may ride on the hay-load,” smiled Laura. “That won’t do at all,” Elliott shook her head. “If I can’t pitch hay, I’ll stay here.” Laura laughed and said: “You certainly will be more comfortable here. I can’t quite see you pitching hay.” And Elliott retorted: “You don’t know what I could do, if I tried. But since you won’t let me try—”

It was all smiling and gay, but it was a crawl, and Elliott knew it and knew that Laura knew it, and she felt ashamed. Wasn’t Stannard’s frank shirking better than her camouflaged variety? But hadn’t she picked berries all the morning in a stuffy sunbonnet under a broiling sun, until she felt as red as a berry and much less fresh and sweet?

“It’s a shame,” said Laura, “that this is just our busy season; but you know you have to make hay while the sun shines. Father thinks we can finish the lower 82 meadows to-day. Then to-morrow we begin cutting on the hill. It’s really fun to ride the hay-rake. I mostly drive the rake, though now and then I pitch for variety.”

She looked so strong and brown and merry, as she talked, that Elliott, comfortably established with “Lorna Doone,” felt almost like flinging her book into the next chair, slipping her arm through Laura’s, and crying, “Lead on!” But she remembered just in time that, as she hadn’t wished to come to the Cameron Farm, it would ill become her to have a good time there. Which may seem like a childish way of looking at the thing, but isn’t really confined to children at all.

So the hay-makers tramped away down the road, their laughter floating cheerfully back over their shoulders; and Elliott sat on the big shady veranda and read her book.

She might have enjoyed it less had she 83 heard Henry’s frank summary at the turn of the lane, when his father inquired the whereabouts of Stannard.

“Beau Brummell hiked over to Upton half an hour ago. I offered him the other Henry, but he doesn’t seem to care to drive anything short of a Pierce-Arrow. Twins, aren’t they?” and Henry nodded in the direction of the veranda.

“Sh-h!” reproved Laura. “They’re our guests.”

“Guests is just it. Yes, they’re guests, all right.”

“Mother says they don’t know how to work,” Priscilla observed.

“That’s another true word, too.”

Mother turned gaily in the road ahead. “Who is talking about me?” she called.

Priscilla frisked on to join her, and Henry fell back to a confidential exchange with Laura. “Beau wouldn’t be so bad if he could forget for a minute that he owned the earth and had a mortgage on the solar 84 system. But when he tries to snub Bruce—gee, that gets me!”

“Aren’t you twanging the G string rather often lately, Hal?—Stannard can’t snub Bruce. Bruce isn’t the kind of fellow to be snubbed.”

“Just the same, it makes me sick to think anybody’s a cousin to me that would try it.”

Laura switched back to the main subject. “We didn’t ask them up here as extra farm hands, you know.”

“Bull’s-eye,” said Henry, and grinned.

What she did not know failed to trouble Elliott. She read on in lonely peace through the afternoon. At a most exciting point the telephone rang. Four, that was the Cameron call. Elliott went into the house and took down the receiver.

“Mr. Robert Cameron’s,” she said pleasantly.

“S-say!” stuttered a high, sharp voice, “my little b-b-boys have let your c-c-cows 85 out o’ the p-p-pasture. I’ll g-give ’em a t-t-trouncin’, but ’t won’t git your c-c-cows back. They let ’em out the G-G-Garrett Road, and your medder gate’s open. Jim B-B-Blake saw it this mornin’! Why the man didn’t shut it, I d-d-dunno. You’ll have to hurry to save your medder.”

“But,” gasped Elliott, “I don’t understand! You say the cows—”

“Are comin’ down G-Garrett Road,” snapped the stuttering voice, “the whole kit an’ b-b-bilin’ of ’em. They’ll be inter your upper m-medder in five m-m-minutes.”

Over the wire came the click of a receiver snapping back on its hook. Elliott hung up and started toward the door. The cows had been let out. Just why this incident was so disastrous she did not quite comprehend, but she must go and tell her uncle. Before her feet touched the veranda, however, she stopped. Five minutes? Why, there wouldn’t be time to 86 go to the lower meadow, to say nothing of any one’s doing anything about the situation.

And then, with breath-taking suddenness, the thing burst on her. She was alone in the house; even Aunt Jessica and Priscilla had gone to the hay-field. The situation, whatever it was, was up to her.

For a minute the girl leaned weakly against the wall. Cows—there were thirty in the herd—and she loathed cows! She was afraid of cows. She knew nothing about cows. She was never in the slightest degree sure of what the creatures might take it into their heads to do. For a minute she stood irresolute. Then something stirred in the girl, something self-reliant and strong. Never in her life had Elliott Cameron had to do alone anything that she didn’t already know how to do. Now for the first time she faced an emergency on none but her own resources, 87 an emergency that was quite out of her line.

Her brain worked swiftly as her feet moved to the door. In reality, she had wavered only a second. When Tom went for the cows, didn’t he take old Prince? There was just a chance that Prince wasn’t in the hay-field. She ran down the steps calling, “Prince! Prince!” The old dog rose deliberately from his place on the shady side of the barn and trotted toward her, wagging his tail. “Come, Prince!” cried Elliott, and ran out of the yard.

Luckily, berrying had that very morning taken her by a short cut to the vicinity of the upper meadow. She knew the way. But what was likely to happen? Town-bred girl that she was, she had no idea. A recollection of the smooth, upstanding expanse of the upper meadow gave her a clue. If the cows got into that 88 even erectness— She began to run, Prince bounding beside her, his brown tail a waving plume.

She could see the meadow now, a smooth green sea ruffled by nothing heavier than the light feet of the summer breeze. She could see the great gate invitingly open to the road and oh!—her heart stopped beating, then pounded on at a suffocating pace—she could see the cows! There they came, down the hill, quite filling the narrow roadway with their horrid bulk, making it look like a moving river of broad backs and tossing heads. What could she do, the girl wondered; what could she do against so many? She tried to run faster. Somehow she must reach the gate first. There was nothing even then, so far as she knew, to prevent their trampling her down and rushing over her into the waving greenness, unless she could slam the gate in their faces. You can see that she really did not know much about cows.

But Prince knew them. Prince understood now why his master’s guest had summoned him to this hot run in the sunshine. The prospect did not daunt Prince. He ran barking to the meadow side of the road. The foremost cow which, grazing the dusty grass, had strayed toward the gate, turned back into the ruts again. Elliott pulled the gate shut, in her haste leaving herself outside. There, too spent to climb over, she flattened her slender form against the gray boards, while, driven by Prince, the whole herd, horns tossing, tails switching, flanks heaving, thudded its way past.

And there, three minutes later, Bruce, dashing over the hill in response to a message relayed by telephone and boy to the lower meadow, found her.

“The cows have gone down,” Elliott told him. “Prince has them. He will take them home, won’t he?”

“Prince? Good enough! He’ll get the 90 cows home all right. But what are you doing in this mix-up?”

“A woman telephoned the house,” said Elliott. “I was afraid I couldn’t reach any of you in time, so I came over myself.”

“You like cows?” The question shot at her like a bullet.

The piquant nose wrinkled entrancingly. “Scared to death of ’em.”

“I guessed as much.” The boy nodded. “Gee whiz, but you’ve got good stuff in you!”

And though her shoes were dusty and her hair tousled, and though her knees hadn’t stopped shaking even yet, Elliott Cameron felt a sudden sense of satisfaction and pride. She turned and looked over the fence at the meadow. In its unmarred beauty it seemed to belong to her.