“Hold on! Hold on!” exclaimed Jennie Stone gruffly, pulling a paper out of her handbag. “Wait just a minute, young lady. I will not take a back seat for anybody when it comes to statistics of work. Just listen here. These are some of the things I have done since I joined up with that diet kitchen outfit. I have tasted soup and broth thirty-seven thousand eight hundred and three times. I have tasted ten thousand, one hundred and eleven separate custards. I have tasted twenty thousand ragouts—many of them of rabbit, and I am always suspicious that the rabbit may have had a long tail—ugh! Baked cabbage and cheese, nine thousand, seven hundred and six——”
“Jennie! Do stop! How could you eat so much?” demanded Helen in horror.
“Bless you! the poilus did the eating; I only did the seasoning and tasting. It’s that keeps me so fat, I do believe. And then, I have served one million cups of cocoa.”
“Why don’t you say a billion? You might as well.”
“Because I can’t count up to a billion. I never could,” declared the fleshy girl. “I never was top-hole at mathematics. You know that.”
They tried to cheer Ruth in her affliction; but the girl of the Red Mill was really much depressed. She had always been physically, as well as mentally, active. And at first she must remain in bed and pose as a regular invalid.
She was thus posing when Tom Cameron got a four-days’ leave and came back as far as Clair, as he always did when he was free. It was so much nearer than Paris; and Helen could always run up here and meet him, where Ruth had been at work. The chums spent Tom’s vacations from the front together as much as possible.
When Mr. Cameron, who had been in Europe with a Government commission, had returned to the United States, he had laughingly left Helen and Tom in Ruth’s care.
“But he never would have entrusted you children to my care,” sighed the girl of the Red Mill, “if he had supposed I would be so foolish as to get a broken shoulder.”
“Quite,” said Tom, nodding a wise head. “One might have supposed that if an aerial shell hit your shoulder the shell would be damaged, not the shoulder.”