At this second Carol realized that for all Guy’s love of dead elegances his timidity was as depressing to her as the bulkiness of Sam Clark.  She realized that he was not a mystery, as she had excitedly believed; not a romantic messenger from the World Outside on whom she could count for escape.  He belonged to Gopher Prairie, absolutely.  She was snatched back from a dream of far countries, and found herself on Main Street.

He was completing his protest, “You don’t want to be mixed up in all this orgy of meaningless discontent?”

She soothed him.  “No, I don’t.  I’m not heroic.  I’m scared by all the fighting that’s going on in the world.  I want nobility and adventure, but perhaps I want still more to curl on the hearth with some one I love.”

“Would you——­”

He did not finish it.  He picked up a handful of pop-corn, let it run through his fingers, looked at her wistfully.

With the loneliness of one who has put away a possible love Carol saw that he was a stranger.  She saw that he had never been anything but a frame on which she had hung shining garments.  If she had let him diffidently make love to her, it was not because she cared, but because she did not care, because it did not matter.

She smiled at him with the exasperating tactfulness of a woman checking a flirtation; a smile like an airy pat on the arm.  She sighed, “You’re a dear to let me tell you my imaginary troubles.”  She bounced up, and trilled, “Shall we take the pop-corn in to them now?”

Guy looked after her desolately.

While she teased Vida and Kennicott she was repeating, “I must go on.”

VI

Miles Bjornstam, the pariah “Red Swede,” had brought his circular saw and portable gasoline engine to the house, to cut the cords of poplar for the kitchen range.  Kennicott had given the order; Carol knew nothing of it till she heard the ringing of the saw, and glanced out to see Bjornstam, in black leather jacket and enormous ragged purple mittens, pressing sticks against the whirling blade, and flinging the stove-lengths to one side.  The red irritable motor kept up a red irritable “tip-tip-tip-tip-tip-tip.”  The whine of the saw rose till it simulated the shriek of a fire-alarm whistle at night, but always at the end it gave a lively metallic clang, and in the stillness she heard the flump of the cut stick falling on the pile.

She threw a motor robe over her, ran out.  Bjornstam welcomed her, “Well, well, well!  Here’s old Miles, fresh as ever.  Well say, that’s all right; he ain’t even begun to be cheeky yet; next summer he’s going to take you out on his horse-trading trip, clear into Idaho.”

“Yes, and I may go!”

“How’s tricks?  Crazy about the town yet?”

“No, but I probably shall be, some day.”

“Don’t let ’em get you.  Kick ’em in the face!”

He shouted at her while he worked.  The pile of stove-wood grew astonishingly.  The pale bark of the poplar sticks was mottled with lichens of sage-green and dusty gray; the newly sawed ends were fresh-colored, with the agreeable roughness of a woolen muffler.  To the sterile winter air the wood gave a scent of March sap.