"Very well, show me, please," she demanded, as she would if the question had been one of walking over red-hot plowshares. She stood and looked about her as he answered her, so intent that she did not hear what he replied. The place had rows of bunks in various stages of untidiness. It was lighted by two very smoky kerosene lamps, and had in its middle a table with cards on it. Three men sat about the table, as if they did not quite know whether to come forward and be included in the conversation or not. At the further end Marjorie could see the door that led to the cooking-place, and eyed it with interest. "These are all of the men who are here," Francis explained. "There is another camp some miles further in the forest." "Am I to cook for them as well?" demanded Marjorie coolly. "Oh, no," the Englishman answered. He seemed deeply shocked at the idea. "They have a cook. By the way, Mrs. Ellison, it is only poetic justice that you should have taken over this job; for do you know that the reason Pierre gave for his sudden flight in the direction of marriage was that you and Mr. Ellison looked so happy he got lonesome for a wife!" "Good gracious!" gasped Marjorie before she remembered herself. . . . "That is--I didn't know our happiness showed as far off as that." She did not dare to look at Francis, whom she divined to be standing rigidly behind her. "And now could you show me the place where I have to cook, and the things to cook with?" Mr. Pennington--Harmsworth-Pennington was his veritable name, as she learned later--took the hint and swept her immediately off to the lean-to. The _tout-ensemble_ was not terrifying. It consisted of a kerosene stove of two burners, another one near it for emergencies, a wooden cupboard full of heavy white dishes, and a lower part to it where the stores were. "The hardest thing for you will be getting up early," he said sympathetically. "The men have to have breakfast and be out of here by seven o'clock. And they take dinner-pails with them. Then there's nothing to get till the evening meal." "Of course there'd be tidying to do," suggested Marjorie avidly, for she hated disorder, and saw a good deal about her. "If you had the strength for it," said Pennington doubtfully. "Francis thinks I have," she answered with a touch of wickedness. Francis, behind her, continued to say nothing at all. She spent five minutes more in the lean-to with the opportune Pennington, and gathered from him, finally, that next morning there would have to be a big pot of oatmeal cooked, and bacon enough fried for five hungry men. Griddle cakes, flapjacks, or breadstuff of some kind had to be produced also; coffee in a pot that looked big enough for a hotel, with condensed milk, and a meal apiece for their dinner-hour. "I just give 'em anything cold that's left over," said Pennington unsympathetically. "There has to be lots of it, that's all." Marjorie cried out in horror.