"To help win the war?" echoed Elliott, and blankly and suddenly shut her mouth. Why, she supposed it did help, after all! But it was their work, the kind of thing they had always done, up here at the Cameron Farm; only, as Bruce had assured her, the girls hadn't done much of it. Was that what Bruce had meant, too? "Why did you suppose we put so much more land under cultivation this year than we ever had before, with less help in sight?" Laura questioned. "Just for fun, or for the money we could get out of it?" "I hadn't thought much about it," said Elliott. She was thinking now. Had she been a bit of a slacker? She loathed slackers. "I never thought of it as war work," she said. "Stupid, wasn't I?" Laura put the last hair-pin in place. "Just thought of it as our job, did you? So it is, of course. But when your job happens to be war work too--well, you just buckle down to it extra hard. I've never been so thankful as this year and last that we have the farm. It gives every one of us such a splendid chance to feel we're really counting in this fight--the boys over there and in camp, the rest of us here." Laura's dark eyes were beginning to shine. "Oh, I wouldn't be anywhere but on a farm for anything in the wide world, unless, perhaps, somewhere in France!" She stopped suddenly, put down the hand-mirror with which she was surveying her back hair, and blushed. "There!" she said, "I forgot all about the fact that you weren't born on a farm, too. But then, you can share ours for a year, so I'm not going to apologize for a word I've said, even if I have been bragging because I'm so lucky." Bragging because she was lucky! And Laura meant it. There was not the ghost of a pose in her frank, downright young pride. Her cousin felt like a person who has been walking down-stairs and tries to step off a tread that isn't there. Elliott's own cheeks reddened as she thought of the patronizing pity she had felt. Luckily, Laura hadn't seemed to notice it. And Laura was quick to see things, too. Elliott realized, with a little stab of chagrin, that Laura wouldn't understand why her cousin had pitied her, even if some one should be at pains to explain the fact to her. But Elliott couldn't let herself pass as an intentional slacker. "We girls did canteening at home; surgical dressings and knitting, too, of course, but canteening was the most fun." "That must have been fine." Laura was interested at once. Elliott's spirit revived. After all, Laura was a country girl. "Do you have a canteen here?" "Oh, no, Highboro isn't big enough. No trains stop here for more than a minute. We're not on the direct line to any of the camps, either." "Ours was a regular canteen," said Elliott. "They would telephone us when soldiers were going through, and we would go down, with Mrs. Royce or Aunt Margaret or some other chaperon, and distribute post-cards and cigarettes and sweet chocolate; and ice-cream cones, if the weather was hot. It was such fun to talk to the men!"