"You mean—how do they treat the girls?" laughed Mrs. Fergusson. "They're charming to the girls! Chivalrous, kind, everything they should be. But then," she added proudly, "my girls are the pick—educated women all of them. I could trust them anywhere. And Captain Ellesborough—you won't get any mischief going on where he is."
Meanwhile the captain, well out of earshot of Mrs. Fergusson's praise, was explaining the organization of the camp to Rachel as they slowly climbed the hill, on the opposite side from that by which she and Janet had descended.
"Which works hardest, I wonder?" she said at last, as they paused to look down on the scene below. "We on our farm, or you here? I've never had more than five hours' sleep through the harvest? But now things are slacker."
He threw his head back with a laugh.
"Why, this seems to me like playing at lumbering! It's all so tiny—so babyish. Oh, yes, there's plenty of work—for the moment. But it'll be all done, in one more season; not a stick left. England can't grow a real forest."
"Compared to America?"
"Well, I was thinking of Canada. Do you know Canada?"
"A little." Then she added hastily: "But I never saw any lumbering."
"What a pity! It's a gorgeous life. Oh, not for women. These women here—awfully nice girls, and awfully clever too—couldn't make anything of it in Canada. I had a couple of square miles of forest to look after—magnificent stuff!—Douglas fir most of it—and two pulping mills, and about two hundred men—a rough lot."
"But you're not Canadian?"