Her hand disappeared in his blackened leather glove.  From the turn in the road she waved at him.  She walked on more soberly now, and she was lonely.

But the wheat and grass were sleek velvet under the sunset; the prairie clouds were tawny gold; and she swung happily into Main Street.

II

Through the first days of June she drove with Kennicott on his calls.  She identified him with the virile land; she admired him as she saw with what respect the farmers obeyed him.  She was out in the early chill, after a hasty cup of coffee, reaching open country as the fresh sun came up in that unspoiled world.  Meadow larks called from the tops of thin split fence-posts.  The wild roses smelled clean.

As they returned in late afternoon the low sun was a solemnity of radial bands, like a heavenly fan of beaten gold; the limitless circle of the grain was a green sea rimmed with fog, and the willow wind-breaks were palmy isles.

Before July the close heat blanketed them.  The tortured earth cracked.  Farmers panted through corn-fields behind cultivators and the sweating flanks of horses.  While she waited for Kennicott in the car, before a farmhouse, the seat burned her fingers and her head ached with the glare on fenders and hood.

A black thunder-shower was followed by a dust storm which turned the sky yellow with the hint of a coming tornado.  Impalpable black dust far-borne from Dakota covered the inner sills of the closed windows.

The July heat was ever more stifling.  They crawled along Main Street by day; they found it hard to sleep at night.  They brought mattresses down to the living-room, and thrashed and turned by the open window.  Ten times a night they talked of going out to soak themselves with the hose and wade through the dew, but they were too listless to take the trouble.  On cool evenings, when they tried to go walking, the gnats appeared in swarms which peppered their faces and caught in their throats.

She wanted the Northern pines, the Eastern sea, but Kennicott declared that it would be “kind of hard to get away, just now.”  The Health and Improvement Committee of the Thanatopsis asked her to take part in the anti-fly campaign, and she toiled about town persuading householders to use the fly-traps furnished by the club, or giving out money prizes to fly-swatting children.  She was loyal enough but not ardent, and without ever quite intending to, she began to neglect the task as heat sucked at her strength.

Kennicott and she motored North and spent a week with his mother—­that is, Carol spent it with his mother, while he fished for bass.

The great event was their purchase of a summer cottage, down on Lake Minniemashie.

Perhaps the most amiable feature of life in Gopher Prairie was the summer cottages.  They were merely two-room shanties, with a seepage of broken-down chairs, peeling veneered tables, chromos pasted on wooden walls, and inefficient kerosene stoves.  They were so thin-walled and so close together that you could—­and did—­hear a baby being spanked in the fifth cottage off.  But they were set among elms and lindens on a bluff which looked across the lake to fields of ripened wheat sloping up to green woods.