“Perhaps Max will come round and ask us to put up another tent for ourselves.”

“Not much he won’t.  Never mind, I’m satisfied if he submits to this.”

When Max opened his eyes the next morning it was difficult for him to realize where he was.  He lay staring at the flecks of sunlight on the pine-needle-strewn ground, wondering how it happened that he had not wakened in damp discomfort from hot and perspiring slumbers.  Before he felt himself fully awake he was conscious of a voice a few feet away, exclaiming: 

“Oh, Mr. Ferry, how kind of you!  What splendid strawberries!  Out of your own garden?  You must be an accomplished gardener.”  It was Josephine’s voice.

“Only a novice, but I’m rather proud of these.  I hope the first night was a comfortable one?”

“Perfect!  Our friends are still sleeping—­though they won’t be long if I shout like this.”

“I’ve been up so long I didn’t realize it was barely seven o’clock.  But I wanted to make sure of your having these for the first camp breakfast.  I’ll disappear now, and perhaps I can venture to appear again, later in the day, with my mother.  We want to offer our services as neighbours from whom anything, from axes to apricots, can be borrowed.”

Max could hear Josephine’s low laugh echoed by a small ecstatic chuckle from the other side of the canvas wall which separated his head from Sally’s.  Her whisper came from very near his ear: 

“Max, are you awake?  Did you hear what Jo said?  We’re to have fresh strawberries, right out of a garden, for breakfast.  Aren’t you glad you’re alive?”

Where was his ill-temper?  He felt for it, in the recesses of his inner man, and couldn’t seem to find it.  He had had nine long hours of refreshing sleep, in the purest air to be found in the country, and had wakened with a sense of refreshment and well-being such as he had not experienced in many months.  A faint, but appetizing, odour of cookery, including that of fragrant coffee, was in the air, and there were to be freshly picked strawberries for breakfast.  And on the other side of the tent wall was a happy young convalescent, demanding of him whether it was not good to be alive.  He found himself answering, in a genuinely cheerful tone: 

“I’m certainly mighty glad you’re alive, Sally Lunn!”

CHAPTER VII

EVERYBODY IS SATISFIED

“Bobby, let’s have a garden, you and I.”  Bob looked up from the front of the tent platform, where he sat polishing a pair of much-worn russet shoes.  Riding back and forth, nights and mornings, on a bicycle, over very dusty roads, made it necessary to polish often.  But Bob didn’t mind.  The two weeks of camp life he had enjoyed had made him indifferent to any extra trouble involved.

“Looks as if you had a garden somewhere,” he responded, eyeing with favour the pailful of red raspberries Sally held up.  “You must have got up with the lark, to have picked all those.  Mary Ann hasn’t more than started the fire in the kitchen tent.  I had to go and help her.  That girl doesn’t know how to boil an egg.  She cracks it getting it in.  Her coffee is a thick, dark, wicked looking stuff.  What do you suppose she does to it?” he asked in a whisper.