Well, in time he would get over all this, he supposed.  Even his father had been restless as a young man, and had run away into a new country.  It was a storm that died down at last,—­but what a pity not to do anything with it!  A waste of power—­for it was a kind of power; he sprang to his feet and stood frowning against the ruddy light, so deep in his struggling thoughts that he did not notice a man, mounting from the lower terraces, who stopped to look at him.

The stranger scrutinized Claude with interest.  He saw a young man standing bareheaded on the long flight of steps, his fists clenched in an attitude of arrested action,—­his sandy hair, his tanned face, his tense figure copper-coloured in the oblique rays.  Claude would have been astonished if he could have known how he seemed to this stranger.

II

The next morning Claude stepped off the train at Frankfort and had his breakfast at the station before the town was awake.  His family were not expecting him, so he thought he would walk home and stop at the mill to see Enid Royce.  After all, old friends were best.

He left town by the low road that wound along the creek.  The willows were all out in new yellow leaves, and the sticky cotton-wood buds were on the point of bursting.  Birds were calling everywhere, and now and then, through the studded willow wands, flashed the dazzling wing of a cardinal.

All over the dusty, tan-coloured wheatfields there was a tender mist of green,—­millions of little fingers reaching up and waving lightly in the sun.  To the north and south Claude could see the corn-planters, moving in straight lines over the brown acres where the earth had been harrowed so fine that it blew off in clouds of dust to the roadside.  When a gust of wind rose, gay little twisters came across the open fields, corkscrews of powdered earth that whirled through the air and suddenly fell again.  It seemed as if there were a lark on every fence post, singing for everything that was dumb; for the great ploughed lands, and the heavy horses in the rows, and the men guiding the horses.

Along the roadsides, from under the dead weeds and wisps of dried bluestem, the dandelions thrust up their clean, bright faces.  If Claude happened to step on one, the acrid smell made him think of Mahailey, who had probably been out this very morning, gouging the sod with her broken butcher knife and stuffing dandelion greens into her apron.  She always went for greens with an air of secrecy, very early, and sneaked along the roadsides stooping close to the ground, as if she might be detected and driven away, or as if the dandelions were wild things and had to be caught sleeping.

Claude was thinking, as he walked, of how he used to like to come to mill with his father.  The whole process of milling was mysterious to him then; and the mill house and the miller’s wife were mysterious; even Enid was, a little—­until he got her down in the bright sun among the cat-tails.  They used to play in the bins of clean wheat, watch the flour coming out of the hopper and get themselves covered with white dust.