There was a long trestled table down the middle of the men's cabin, and each man, streaming out, picked up a plate and got it filled with food, and sat himself down in what seemed to be an appointed place. There were mugs for coffee, and Marjorie, under Pennington's direction, set them at all the places, and then went up and down filling them. There was a tin of condensed milk on the table, set there by Pennington's helpful hand.
She ran up and down, waiting on her charges, and feeling very much as if she were conducting a Sunday-school class picnic. The men, except Pennington and the other young Englishman, who never talked to the last day she knew him, seemed struck into terrified silence by their new cook.
And then a terrible thought came over her—it was rather a funny one, though, for the excitement of doing all this new work had stirred her up, rather than saddened her. She had never prepared any dinner-pails for them. She fled back into the cook-place precipitately, snatched the pails down from the shelf, and began feverishly spreading large biscuits with butter and bacon.
"There's marmalade in the big tin back of you," said Pennington's softly cultivated Oxford voice from the doorway. "And if you fill the small buckets with coffee they will take them, together with the rest of their dinners."
"But is that enough variety, just bacon and marmalade sandwiches?" she asked.
He nodded.
"There are tinned vegetables that you can give them to-night, if you wish."
So, he helping her, they got the last dinner-pail filled before the hungry horde poured out again. Each passed with a sheepish or courteous word of thanks, took his pail and went on. It did not occur to Marjorie till she saw Pennington go, eating as he went a large biscuit, that he must have cut his own meal very short in order to help her.
"What nice people there are in the world!" she breathed, sinking on the doorstep a minute to think and take breath.
She sat there longer than she really should, because the air was so crisp and lovely, and just as she was beginning to rise and go in to the summoning dishes, a small striped squirrel trotted across the grass and requested scraps with impudent wavings of his two small front paws. So she really had to stay and feed him. And after that there was a bird that actually seemed as if it was going to walk up to her, almost as the squirrel had done. He flew away just at the most exciting moment, but Marjorie didn't hold it against him. And then—why, then, she felt suddenly sleepy and lay down with her cloak swathed around her, under a tree, for just a minute. And when she looked at her wrist-watch it was eleven o'clock.