Though she was all alone in the kitchen--washing potatoes, too--she didn't appear in the least unhappy. She went over to the stove, lifted a lid, glanced in, and added two or three sticks of wood to the fire. Then she brought out a pan of apples and went down cellar after a roll of pie crust. Some one else may have made that pie crust. Elliott took it into the pantry, turned the board on the flour barrel, shook flour evenly over it from the sifter, and, cutting off one end of the pie crust, began to roll it out thin on the board. She arranged the lower crust on three pie-plates, and, going into the kitchen again, began to peel the apples and cut them up into the pies. Perhaps she wasn't so quick about it as Laura might have been, but she did very well. The skin fell from her knife in long, thin, curly strips. After that she finished the pies off in the pantry and tucked all three into the oven. Squatting on her feet in front of the door, she studied the dial intently for a moment and hesitatingly pushed the draft just a crack open. If it hadn't been for that momentary indecision, you might have thought that she had been baking pies all her life. Then she began to peel the potatoes. [Illustration: "I'm getting dinner all by myself"] So it was that Stannard found her. "Hello!" he said, with a grin. "Busy?" "Indeed, I am! I'm getting dinner all by myself." He went through a pantomime of dodging a blow. "Whew-ee! Guess I'll take to the woods." "Better not. If you do, you will miss a good dinner. Mother Jess said I might try it. Boiled potatoes and baked fish--she showed me how to fix that--and corn and things. There's one other dish on my menu that I'm not going to tell you." And all her dimples came into play. "H'm!" said Stannard, "we feel pretty smart, don't we? Well, maybe I'll stay and see how it pans out. A fellow can always tighten his belt, you know." "Aren't you horrid!" She made up a face at him, a captivating little grimace that wrinkled her nose and set imps of mischief dancing in her eyes. Stannard watched her as with firm motions she stripped the husks from the corn, picking off the clinging strands of silk daintily. "Gee, Elliott!" he exclaimed. "Do you know, you're prettier than ever!" She dropped him a courtesy. "I must be, with a smooch of flour on my nose and my hair every which way." He grinned. "That's a story. Your hair looks as though Madame What-'s-her-name, that you and Mater and the girls go to so much, had just got through with you. I've never seen you when you didn't look as though you had come out of a bandbox." "Haven't you? Think again, Stan, think again! What about your Cousin Elliott in a corn-field?" Stannard slapped his thigh. "That's so, too! I forgot that. But your hair's all to the good, even then." "Stan," warned Elliott, "you'd better be careful. You will get in too deep to wade out, if you don't watch your step. What are you getting at, anyway? Why all these compliments?"