Of course Elliott never could have done it without the Gordons. Elliott and Harriet made the crab-apple juice into jelly, Mrs. Gordon sent in bread and cookies, and both mother and daughter stood behind the girl with their skill and experience, ready to be called on at a moment’s notice.

“Just send for us any time you get into trouble or want help about something,” said Mrs. Gordon over the telephone. “One of us will come right up. Most likely it will be Harriet. I’m so cumbersome, I can’t get about as I’d like to. Large bodies move slowly, you know.”

Other people besides the Gordons sent 224 in things to eat. Elliott thought she had never known such a stream of generosity as set toward the white house at the end of the road—intelligent generosity, too. There seemed a definite plan and some consultation behind it. Mr. Blair brought a roast of beef already cooked, from Mrs. Blair, and hoped for both of them that there would soon be good news of the boy. The Blisses sent in pies enough for two days and asked Elliott to let them know when she was ready for more. People she knew and people she didn’t know brought rolls and cookies and doughnuts and gelatines and even roast chickens, and asked, with real anxiety in their voices, for the latest news from Camp Devens.

They didn’t bring their offerings all at once; they brought them continuously and steadily and with truly remarkable appropriateness. Just when Elliott was thinking that she must begin to cook, something was sure to rattle up to the door in a 225 wagon, or roll up in an automobile, or travel on foot in a basket. It was the extreme timeliness of the gifts that proved the guiding intelligence behind them.

“They couldn’t all happen so,” was Henry’s conclusion. “Now, could they? Gee! and I’ve thought some of those folks were pokes!”

“So have I,” said Elliott, feeling very much ashamed of her hasty judgments.

“You never know till you get into trouble how good people are,” was Father Bob’s verdict.

Gertrude fingered a doughnut ruefully. “I want it, but I’m almost ashamed to eat it. I’ve thought such horrid things of that old Mrs. Gadsby that made ’em.”

“They’re good,” said Tom. “Mrs. Gadsby knows how to make doughnuts, if she has got a tongue in her head! Say, but I’d as soon have thought old Allen would send us doughnuts as the Gadsby.”

“Mr. Allen brought us a tongue this 226 morning,” Elliott remarked; “said his housekeeper boiled it; hoped it wasn’t too tough to eat. You couldn’t ‘git nothin’ good, these days!’”

“Enoch Allen?” demanded Henry; “the old fellow that lives at the foot of the hill? Go tell that to the marines!”

“I don’t know where he lives,” said Elliott, “but he certainly said his name was Enoch Allen.”

Bruce chuckled. “Mother Jess’s chickens have come home to roost, all right.”

“What did she ever do for Enoch Allen?” asked Tom.

“Oh, don’t you remember,” cried Gertrude, “the time his old dog died? Mother found the dog one day, dying in the woods. I was along and she sent me to call Mr. Allen, while she stayed with the dog. I was just a little girl and kind of scared, but Mother said Mr. Allen wasn’t anybody to be afraid of; he was just a lonely old man. I heard him tell 227 her it wasn’t every woman would have stayed with his dog. It was dead when he got there.”

But even with competent advisers within call and all the aids that came in the shape of “Mother Jess’s chickens,” and with the best family in the world all eagerness to be helpful and to “carry on” during Laura and Mother Jess’s absence, Elliott found that housekeeping wasn’t half so simple as it looked.

Life still had its moments and she was in the midst of one of the worst of them now. If you have ever stood in a kitchen where little gray kittens of dust rollicked under the chairs and all the dinner kettles and pans were piled on the table, unscraped and unwashed, and you saw ahead of you more things that you had planned to do than you could possibly get through before supper, and one girl was crying in the attic and another was crying in the china-closet, and your own heart was in your 228 boots, you know how Elliott Cameron felt at this minute. Everything had gone wrong, since the time she got up half an hour late in the morning; but the most wrong thing of all was the letter from Laura.

It had come just as they were finishing dinner, for the postman was late. Father Bob had cut it open, while every one looked eager and hopeful. Mother Jess had written the day before that the doctors thought Sidney was better; there had been a telegram to that effect, too. Father Bob read Laura’s letter quite through before he opened his lips. It wasn’t a long letter. Then he said: “The boy’s not so well, to-day.—Bruce, we must finish the ensilage. Come out as soon as you’re through, boys. Tom, I want you to get in the tomatoes before night. We’re due for a freeze, unless signs fail.” Not another word about Sidney. And he went right out of the room.

“What does she say?” whispered Gertrude, dropping her fork so that it rattled against her plate. Gertrude was always dropping things, but this time she didn’t flush, as she usually did, at her own awkwardness.

Elliott picked up the letter Father Bob had left beside her plate. She dreaded to unfold the single sheet, but what else could she do, with all those pairs of anxious eyes fixed on her? She steadied her voice and read slowly and without a trace of expression:

“Sidney had a bad time in the night, but is resting more easily this morning. Mother never leaves him. Every one is so good to us here. His officers seem to think a lot of Sid. So do the men of his company, as far as we have seen them. I don’t know what to write you, Father. The doctor says, ‘While there’s life there’s hope, and that our coming is the only thing that has saved Sid so far. He says that he has seen the sickest of boys pull through with their mothers here. We will telegraph when there is any change. Love to all of you, dear ones, and 230 tell Elliott I shall never forget what she has done for me.

“Laura”

The room was very still for a minute. Elliott kept her eyes on the letter, to hide the tears that filled them. Sidney was going to die; she knew it.

Slowly, silently, one after another, they all got up from the table. The boys filed out into the kitchen, washed their hands at the sink, and still without a word went about their work. Gertrude and Priscilla began mechanically to clear the table. A plate crashed to the floor from Gertrude’s hands and shattered to fragments. She stared at the pieces stupidly, as though wondering how they had come there, took a step in the direction of the dust-pan, and, suddenly bursting into tears, turned and ran out of the room. Elliott could hear her feet pounding up-stairs, on, on, till they reached the attic. A door slammed and all was quiet.

Down in the kitchen Elliott and Priscilla faced each other. Great round drops were running down Priscilla’s cheeks, but she looked up at Elliott trustfully. And then Elliott failed her. She knew herself that she was failing. But it seemed as though she just couldn’t keep from crying. “Oh, dear!” she sighed. “Oh, dear, isn’t everything just awful!” Then she did cry.

And over Priscilla’s sober little face—Elliott wasn’t so blinded by her tears that she failed to see it—came the queerest expression of stupefaction and woe and utter forlornness. It was after that that Elliott heard Priscilla sobbing in the china-closet.

Her first impulse was to go to the closet and pull the child out. Her second was to let her stay. “She may as well have her cry out,” thought the girl, unhappily. “I couldn’t do anything to comfort her!”—which 232 shows how very, very, very miserable Elliott was, herself.

The world was topsyturvy and would never get right again.

Instead of going for Priscilla she went for a dust-pan and brush and collected the fragments of broken china. Then she began to pile up the dishes, but, after a few futile movements, sat down in a chair and cried again. It didn’t seem worth while to do anything else. So now there were three girls crying all at once in that house and every one of them in a different place. When at last Elliott did look in the closet Priscilla wasn’t there.

The appearance of that usually spotless kitchen had a queer effect on Elliott. She saw so many things needing to be done at once that she didn’t do any of them. She simply stood and stared hopelessly at the wreck of comfort and cleanliness and good cheer.

“Hello!” said Bruce at the door. “Want an extra hand for an hour?”

“I thought you were cutting ensilage,” said Elliott. It was good to see Bruce; the courage in his voice lifted her spirits in spite of her.

“I’ve left a substitute.” The boy glanced into the stove and started for the wood-box.

“Oh, dear! I forgot that fire. Has it gone out?”

“Not quite. I’ll have it going again in a jiff.”

He came back with a broom in his hands.

“Let me do that,” said the girl.

“Oh, all right.” He relinquished the broom and brought out the dish-pan. “Hi-yi, Stan, lend a hand here!”

The boy in the doorway gave one glance at Elliott’s tear-stained face and came quietly into the room. “Sure,” he said, 234 picking up a dish-cloth and gingerly reaching for a tumbler. “Which end do you take ’em by, top or bottom?”

Stannard wiping dishes, and with Bruce Fearing! The sight was so strange that Elliott’s broom stopped moving. The two boys at the dish-pan chaffed each other good-naturedly; their jokes might have seemed a little forced, had you examined them carefully, but the effect was normal and cheering. Now and then they threw a word to the girl and the pile of clean dishes grew under their hands.

Elliott’s broom began to move again. Something warm stirred at her heart. She felt sober and humble and ashamed and—yes, happy—all at once. How nice boys were when they were nice!

Then she remembered something.

“Oh, Stan, wasn’t it to-day you were going home?”

“Nix,” Stannard replied. “Guess I’ll 235 stay on a bit. School hasn’t begun. I want to go nutting before I hit the trail for home.”

It was a different-looking kitchen the boys left half an hour later and a different-looking girl.

Bruce lingered a minute behind Stannard. “We haven’t had any telegram,” he said. “Remember that. And as for things in here, I wouldn’t let ’em bother me, if I were you! You can’t do everything, you know. Keep cool, feed us the stuff folks send in, and let some things slide.”

“Mother Jess doesn’t let things slide.”

“Mother Jess has been at it a good many years, but I’ll bet she would now and then if things got too thick and she couldn’t keep both ends up. There’s more to Mother Jess’s job than what they call housekeeping.”

“Oh, yes,” sighed Elliott, “I know that. 236 But just what do you mean, Bruce, that I could do?”

He hesitated a minute. “Well, call it morale. That suggests the thing.”

Elliott thought hard for a minute after the door closed on Bruce. Perhaps, after all, seeing that the family had three meals a day and lived in a decently clean house and slept warm at night, necessary as such oversight was, wasn’t the most imperative business in hand. Somehow or other those things weren’t at all what came into her mind when she thought of Aunt Jessica—no, indeed, though Aunt Jessica made such perfectly delicious things to eat. What came into her mind was far different—like the way Aunt Jessica had sat on Elliott’s bed and kissed her, that homesick first night; Aunt Jessica’s face at meal-time, with Uncle Bob across the table and all her boys and girls filling the space between; Aunt Jessica comforting 237 Priscilla when the child had met with some mishap. Priscilla seldom cried when she hurt herself; “Mother kisses the place and makes it well.” The words linked themselves with Bruce’s in Elliott’s thought. Was that what he had meant by morale? She couldn’t have put into words what she understood just then. For a minute a door in her brain seemed to swing open and she saw straight into the heart of things. Then it clicked together and left her saying, “I guess I fell down on that part of my job, Mother Jess.”

Elliott hung up her apron and mounted the stairs. She didn’t stop with the second floor and her own little room, but kept right on to the attic. There was a door at the head of the attic stairs. Elliott pushed it open. On a broken-backed horsehair sofa Gertrude lay, face down, her nose buried in a faded pillow. In a wabbly rocker, at imminent risk of a 238 breakdown, Priscilla jerked back and forth. Gertrude’s hair was tousled and Priscilla’s face was tear-stained and swollen.

“Don’t you think,” Elliott suggested, “it is time we girls washed our faces and made ourselves pretty?”

“I left you all the dishes to do.” Gertrude’s voice was muffled by the pillow. “I—I just couldn’t help it.”

“That’s all right. They’re done now. I didn’t do them, either. Let’s go down-stairs and wash up.”

“I don’t want to be pretty,” Priscilla objected, continuing to rock. Gertrude neither moved nor spoke again.

What should Elliott do? She remembered Bruce.

“We haven’t had any telegram, you know,” she said. Nobody spoke. “Well, then, we were three little geese, weren’t we? Not having had a telegram means a lot just now.” Priscilla stopped rocking.

“I’m going to believe Sidney will get well,” Elliott continued. It was hard work to talk to such unresponsive ears, but she kept right on. “And now I am going down-stairs to put on one of my prettiest dresses, so as to look cheerful for supper. You may try whether you can get into that blue dress of mine you like so much, Trudy. I’m going to let Priscilla wear my coral beads.”

“The pink ones?” asked Priscilla.

“The pink ones. They will be just a match for your pink dress.”

“I don’t feel like dressing up,” said Gertrude.

Elliott felt like clapping her hands. She had roused Trudy to speech.

“Then wear something of your own,” she said stanchly. “It doesn’t matter what we wear, so long as we look nice.”

Mercurial Priscilla was already feeling the new note in the air. Elliott wouldn’t talk so, would she, if Sidney really were 240 not going to get well? And yet there was Gertrude, who didn’t seem to feel cheered up a bit. Pris’s little heart was torn.

Elliott tried one last argument. “I think Mother Jess would like to have us do it for Father Bob and the boys’ sake—to help keep up their courage.”

Priscilla bounced out of the rocker. “Will it help keep up their courage for us to wear our pretty clothes?”

“I had a notion it might.”

“Let’s do it, Trudy. I—I think I feel better already.”

Gertrude sat up on the horsehair sofa. “Maybe Mother would like us to.”

“I’m sure she’d like us to keep on hoping,” said Elliott earnestly. “And it doesn’t matter what we do, so long as we do something to show that’s the way we’ve made up our minds to feel. If you can think of any better way to show it than by dressing up, Trudy—”

“No,” said Gertrude. “But I think I’ll 241 wear my own clothes to-day, Elliott. Thank you, just the same. Some day, if Sid—I mean some day I’ll love to try on your blue dress, if you will let me.”

Three girls, as pretty and chic and trim as nature and the contents of their closets could make them, sat down to supper that night. It was not a jolly meal, but the girls set the pace, and every one did his best to be cheerful and brave.

Half-way through supper Stannard laid down his fork to ask a question. “What’s happened to your hair, Trudy?”

“Elliott did it for me. Do you like it?”

Stannard nodded. “Good work!”

Father Bob, his attention aroused, inspected the three with new interest in his sober eyes. He said nothing then, but after supper his hand fell on Elliott’s shoulder approvingly.

“Well done, little girl! That’s the right way. Face the music with your chin up.”

Elliott felt exactly as though some one had stiffened her spine. The least little doubt had been creeping into her mind lest what she had done had been heartless. Father Bob’s words put that qualm at rest. And, of course, good news would come from Sidney in the morning.

But courage has a way of ebbing in spite of one. It was dark and very cold when a forlorn little figure appeared beside Elliott’s bed.

“I can’t go to sleep. Trudy’s asleep. I can hear her. I think I am going to cry again.”

Elliott sat up. What should she do? What would Aunt Jessica do?

“Come in here and cry on me.”

Priscilla climbed in between the sheets and Elliott put both arms around the little girl. Priscilla snuggled close.

“I tried to think—the way you said, but I can’t. Is Sidney—” sniffle—“going to die—” sniffle—“like Ted Gordon?”

“No,” said Elliott, who a minute ago had been afraid of the very same thing. “No, I am perfectly positive he is going to get well.”

Just saying the words seemed to help, somehow.

Priscilla snuggled closer. “You’re awful comforting. A person gets scared at night.”

“A person does, indeed.”

“Not so much when you’ve got company,” said Priscilla.

The warmth of the little body in her arms struck through to Elliott’s own shivering heart. “Not half so much when you’ve got company,” she acknowledged.