So when Bruce remarked the next day, "I'm going to take part of the afternoon off and go for ferns; want to come?" she answered promptly, "Yes, indeed," though privately she thought him crazy. Ferns, on a perfectly good working-day? But when they were fairly started, she found she hadn't escaped, after all. Instead, she had run right into the thing, so to speak. "We want to make the church look pretty," Bruce said, as they tramped along. "And I happen to know where some beauties grow, maidenhair and the rarer sorts. It isn't everybody I'd dare to take along." "Is that so?" queried the girl. She wondered why. "Things have a way of disappearing in the woods, unless they're treated right. Took a fellow with me once when I went for pink-and-white lady's-slippers, the big ones--they're beauties. He was crazy to go, and he promised to keep the place to himself. You could have picked bushels there then. Now they're all cleaned out." "But why? Did people dig them up?" "Picked'em too close. Some things won't stand being cleaned up the way most people clean up flowers in the woods. They're free, and nobody's responsible." In spite of her thoughts Elliott dimpled. "I think it is quite safe to take me." He grinned. "Maybe that's why I do it." It was very pleasant, tramping along with Bruce in the bright day; pleasant, too, leaving the sunshine for the spicy coolness of the woods, and climbing up, up, among great tree-trunks and mossy rocks and trickling mountain brooks. Or it would have been pleasant, if one could only have forgotten the reason that underlay their journey. But when they had reached Bruce's secret spot and were cutting the wiry brown stems, and packing together carefully the spreading, many-fingered fronds so as not to break the delicate ferns, that undercurrent of numb consternation reasserted itself. Like Priscilla, Elliott felt a little shocked at the brightness of the sunshine, the blueness of the sky, and the beauty of the fern-filled glade. "It was dreadful for him to be killed before he had done anything!" At last the words so long burning in her heart reached the tip of her tongue. "Yes." Bruce's voice was sober. "It sure was hard." [Illustration: Cutting the wiry brown stems in the fern-filled glade.] "I should think his people would feel as though they couldn't _stand_ it!" Elliott declared. "If he had got to France--but now it is just a hideous, hideous waste!" Bruce hesitated. "I suppose that is one way of looking at it." "Why, what other way could there be?" She stared at him in surprise. "He was just learning to fly. He hadn't done anything, had he?" "No, he hadn't done anything. But what he died for is just the same as though he had got across, isn't it, and had downed forty Huns?" She continued to stare fixedly at the boy for a full minute. "Why, yes," she said at last, very slowly; "yes, I suppose it is." Curiously enough, the whole thing looked better from that angle.