“I’ve got to go right in,” she said confidingly, “I’m helping Mrs. Bryant with a dinner. She has company, and they’re going to catch a train, but you can put it right in there between those two trees, wherever it is convenient to you. Just so it keeps out of the garden. I suppose I’ll have to get some one to fix it steady, won’t I? I’ll be out again in a few minutes if you need me for anything,” and she flew in again, and straightening her white apron entered the diningroom with a plate of hot biscuits. Mr. Bryant was a meek, apologetic little man with a retreating chin and kind eyes. He half arose when he saw Joyce as if he thought this was another guest that had somehow got misplaced, but Mrs. Bryant incorporated her at once into the picture with a glance that placed her as a server, and Mr. Bryant slid back into his chair, his mouth the shape of an inaudible O, and addressed himself to this new and mysterious kind of ham that looked like roast veal and cut like chicken. The guests exclaimed with delight over their food. They said they had lived in hotels all winter and it was just wonderful to get back to home cooking again, and what wonderful ham! Was it really ham, just HAM? And how did she do it? Could she give them the recipe? And then Joyce as she came and went with relays of hot biscuits and peas and potatoes heard Mrs. Bryant tell carefully how she rubbed the mustard into the meat, etc., through all the performance just as she had done it, and finish up: “Yes, we think it is the best way in the world to cook ham,” just as if she had been doing it that way all her life. She smiled to herself over the salad as she arranged the ice cold tomatoes on the crisp lettuce leaves. Well, it was a pretty dinner and she was proud to think she had helped make it so. The poor burnt chops were utterly forgotten now, lying in the grass at the kitchen door, and sometime within the next few hours she would get a chance to sit down, perhaps to lie down, somewhere, on the grass if nowhere else, and rest. Oh, that would be wonderful! She took the plates out and brought in the salad, adding some crackers she had found in the pantry, and then slipped out to see what the men were doing. “What a very superior waitress you seem to have, Aunt Mattie,” remarked a niece, eyeing the door through which Joyce had passed, “You don’t want to let me steal her and take her up to New York do you? I’d certainly give a good deal to get one that looked like that. She seems a real lady.” “She is,” said Mrs. Bryant shortly, “She’s not a waitress at all. She’s just a neighbor who came in to help me so that I could have all my time with you instead of running out to the kitchen all the time.”