If Francis knew that the little aproned figure, with flushed cheeks and high-held head, was terrified and homesick under the pride, he said nothing. Nothing, that is, beyond the ordinary courtesies. He offered to help her on with her cloak. After one indignant look at him she let him. The indignation would have puzzled him; but Marjorie's feeling was that a man who would doom you to this sort of a life, put you to such a test as Francis had, was adding insult to injury in helping you on and off with wraps. He, of course, couldn't grasp all this, and felt a little puzzled.
She walked out and over to the door of the lean-to, leaving him to follow.
Pennington's kind and motherly face was peering anxiously out. It came to Marjorie that she was going to have a good deal of trouble keeping him from taking too much work off her shoulders. Some men have the maternal instinct strongly developed, and of such, she was quite sure, was Pennington. She wondered what he was doing so far from England, and what she could do to pay him back for his friendliness—for she felt instinctively that she had a friend in him.
Sure enough, he had started the big pot of water boiling for the oatmeal, and was salting it as she entered.
"Oh, let me!" she cried, and before his doubting eyes she began to stir the oatmeal in.
"I suppose there never was a double boiler big enough," she began doubtfully. "It would save so much trouble."
"We might make one out of a dishpan, perhaps, swung inside this pot," he said.
"And I always thought Englishmen weren't resourceful!" she commented, smiling at him. "We'll try it to-morrow."
Meanwhile, having stirred in all the oatmeal necessary, she lowered the burners a little and began on the coffee. Then she saw the point of the other stove, for she found she needed it for the bacon and biscuits. The actual work was not so complicated; the thing that appalled her was Pennington's insistence on the awful amount of food needed for the six men and herself. But, of course, as she reminded herself, there was a difference between cooking for Cousin Anna and herself on the maid's day out, or for Lucille and herself, and cooking for six hungry men who worked in the open air at reforesting. She did not quite know how people reforested, but she had a vague image in her mind of people going along with armfuls of trees which they stuck in holes.
Presently the breakfast was prepared, and Pennington banged briskly on a dishpan and howled "Chow!" in a way that was most incongruous. He really should have been a Rural Dean, by his looks and his gentle, almost clergymanly genial manners, and every time Marjorie looked at him in his rough clothes she got a shock because he wasn't one.