“You must be nearly starved to death, you poor darling!” exclaimed Bess.
“Haven’t you had anything to eat since yesterday noon?” asked Belle.
“Not enough to give me indigestion,” laughed Cora—she could laugh now, though a few hours before she had thought she could never laugh again. “A soup cube and a chocolate tablet can hardly be called overfeeding, though I did have a few blackberries to help out. But even at that I have some provisions left,” and she took the remaining soup cube out of her pocket.
Bess pounced upon it.
“One of the two I slipped into your pocket for a joke yesterday morning!” she exclaimed.
“It was a very lucky joke for me,” smiled Cora. “I’m going to have this one framed as a memento of my escape.”
There was something more nourishing and abundant before her now, and she did it full justice, while the others looked on happily.
Then, when she had partially satisfied her hunger, questions poured in upon her in a flood, and she had to narrate all the details of her experience from the moment she had been beguiled by the shamming mother bird to the never-to-be-forgotten moment when she had heard the humming of the aircraft motor in the sky.
“If help ever came from heaven it did that time!” she said tremulously, and they all agreed with her most fervently.
“And, oh, girls,” she said to Bess and Belle, “if you only knew how I felt when she spoke, and, almost at the same moment, I saw those two braids on the aviator’s head and realized that I was talking to a woman!”