“What you said about—about what this Ted Gordon died for.”
It was Bruce’s turn to look surprised. “I didn’t think of anything. It’s just a fact, isn’t it?”
Then he began to load himself with ferns. Elliott wouldn’t have supposed any one could carry as many as Bruce shouldered; he had great bunches in his hands, too.
“You look like a walking fernery,” she said.
“Birnam Wood,” he quoted and for a minute she couldn’t think what he meant. “Better let me take some of those on the ground,” he said.
“No, indeed! I am going to do my share.”
Quietly he possessed himself of two of her bunches. “That’s your share. It will be heavy enough before we get home.”
It was heavy, though not for worlds would Elliott have mentioned the fact. She helped Bruce put the ferns in water, and she went out at night and sprinkled 143 them to keep them fresh; but she had an excuse ready when Laura asked if she would like to go over to the little white-spired church on the hill and help arrange them.
Nothing would have induced her to attend the services, either, though afterward she wished that she had. There seemed to have been something so high and fine and—yes—so cheerful about them, so martial and exalted, that she wished she had seen for herself what they were like. In Elliott’s mind gloom had always been inseparably linked with a funeral, gloom and black clothes. Whereas Laura and her mother and Gertrude and Priscilla wore white. A good many things at the Cameron farm were very odd.