“A Canadian?” asked Janet.

“No, an American!  He comes from Maine, but he had been lumbering in Canada, with several mills and, camps under him.  So he volunteered a year ago to bring over a large Forestry battalion—­mostly the men he had been working with in Quebec.  Splendid fellows!  But he’s the king!”

Then she raised her voice,—­

“Captain Ellesborough!”

A young man in uniform, with a slouch hat, came forward, leaping over the logs in his path.  He gave a military salute to the two visitors, and a swift scrutinizing look to each of them.  Rachel was aware of a thin, handsome face bronzed by exposure, a pair of blue eyes, rather pale in colour, to which the sunburn of brow and cheek gave a singular brilliance, and a well-cut, determined mouth.  The shoulders were those of an athlete, but on the whole the figure was lightly and slenderly built, making an impression rather of grace and elasticity than of exceptional strength.

“You would like to see the camp?” he said, looking at Rachel.

“Aren’t you too busy to show it?”

“Not at all.  I am not wanted just now.  Let me help you over those logs.”  He held out his hand.

“Oh, thank you, I don’t want any help,” said Rachel a little scornfully.  He smiled in approving silence, and she followed his lead, leaping and scrambling over the piles of wood, with a deer’s sureness of foot, till he invited her to stop and watch the timber girls at their measuring.  As the two visitors approached, land-women and forest-women eyed each other with friendly looks, but without speech.  For talk, indeed, the business in hand was far too strenuous.  The logs were coming in fast; there must be no slip in measurement or note.  The work was hard, and the women doing it had been at it all day.  But on the whole, what a comely and energetic group, with the bright eyes, the clear skins, the animation born of open air and exercise.

“They can’t talk to you now!” said Mrs. Fergusson in Janet’s ear, amid the din of the engines, “but they’ll talk at tea.  And there’s a dance to-night.”

Janet looked round the wild glen in wonder.

“Who come?”

“Oh, there’s an Air Force camp half a mile away—­an Army Service camp on the other side.  The officers come—­some of them—­every Saturday.  We take down the partitions in our huts.  You can’t think what pretty frocks the girls put on!  And we dance till midnight.”

“And you’ve no difficulty with the men working in the camp?”

“You mean—­how do they treat the girls?” laughed Mrs. Fergusson.  “They’re charming to the girls!  Chivalrous, kind, everything they should be.  But then,” she added proudly, “my girls are the pick—­educated women all of them.  I could trust them anywhere.  And Captain Ellesborough—­you won’t get any mischief going on where he is.”

Meanwhile the captain, well out of earshot of Mrs. Fergusson’s praise, was explaining the organization of the camp to Rachel as they slowly climbed the hill, on the opposite side from that by which she and Janet had descended.