"I couldn't. I don't like the horror of it--seeing people cut up and everything! I knew I ought to and mother thinks I ought to; but I've delayed because I---- Oh, I know what you're thinking!" She stopped and shook several rebellious strands of hair free with a sudden movement of her head. Gentle Mrs. Sanford let her hands drop into her lap, lowering her head in the relief of one who has tried and failed. "Sorry!" Helen's attitude had quite changed. She kissed her aunt on the cheek. "I have an awful temper, haven't I?" Her change of mood had been reflected by her irregular features with singular expressiveness. "I was going to arrange the flowers for the table for our seventeenth cousin and also--do you think cook would let me?--try my hand at the American shortcake thing. I learned how to cook from Jacqueline. I'd rather be a cook than a nurse, if worse comes to worse. Cooks get very good pay." "Helen! Shocking!" exclaimed Mrs. Sanford. Many gentlewomen were nurses. "You'll have to bargain with cook about the shortcake," she added. "Didn't his mother make it back in Massachusetts? Why not Helen of Mervaux, if not Helen of Troy, in Hampshire? Cry Harry, England and St. George! In the name of _Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, allons_!" She was off to the kitchen, whose monarch said, in language of her own, that the way to eat strawberries was with their stems on and dipping them in sugar, or else as jam. In either case they had no relation to cake, and she was not taking cooking lessons from foreign countries. "In other words, 'it's not done,' oh, England!" said Helen. "Whatever you mean by that," began cook. "It should be on British coats-of-arms instead of _Dieu et mon Droit_," Helen explained, without in the least explaining to cook. "I mean, I take the responsibility off your shoulders. If the American is poisoned I go to the gallows." "Oh, very well!" agreed cook, as if convinced that a fatal result was inevitable but satisfied if her alibi were safely established. Helen went to the task with a confident hand, while cook looked on with the same scorn that she would have regarded the introduction of _poi_ or birds' nest soup into that loyal British household. Her task well under way, Helen returned to the garden to pick flowers for the table, the while humming French songs. She had finished with the flowers when Mrs. Sanford entered the dining-room to find her with her fingers outspread on the cloth, resting half her weight on them and looking at one of the family portraits on the wall. "Still in love with your ancestor, Helen?" asked her aunt. Helen was startled back from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. "Yes. I'm coming in here after dark and teach him to fall in love with me. He's the only man who ever will. Being three hundred years old he might take me because of my youth." "My dear, where do you get all your strange ideas?"