But the man looked at her reassuringly and with a certainty that he was a person whom she could trust she confessed, “As a matter of fact I haven’t got anybody straight.”

“Course you haven’t, child.  Well, I’m Sam Clark, dealer in hardware, sporting goods, cream separators, and almost any kind of heavy junk you can think of.  You can call me Sam—­anyway, I’m going to call you Carrie, seein’ ’s you’ve been and gone and married this poor fish of a bum medic that we keep round here.”  Carol smiled lavishly, and wished that she called people by their given names more easily.  “The fat cranky lady back there beside you, who is pretending that she can’t hear me giving her away, is Mrs. Sam’l Clark; and this hungry-looking squirt up here beside me is Dave Dyer, who keeps his drug store running by not filling your hubby’s prescriptions right—­fact you might say he’s the guy that put the ‘shun’ in ‘prescription.’  So!  Well, leave us take the bonny bride home.  Say, doc, I’ll sell you the Candersen place for three thousand plunks.  Better be thinking about building a new home for Carrie.  Prettiest Frau in G. P., if you asks me!”

Contentedly Sam Clark drove off, in the heavy traffic of three Fords and the Minniemashie House Free ’Bus.

“I shall like Mr. Clark . . .  I can’t call him ‘Sam’!  They’re all so friendly.”  She glanced at the houses; tried not to see what she saw; gave way in:  “Why do these stories lie so?  They always make the bride’s home-coming a bower of roses.  Complete trust in noble spouse.  Lies about marriage.  I’m not changed.  And this town—­O my God!  I can’t go through with it.  This junk-heap!”

Her husband bent over her.  “You look like you were in a brown study.  Scared?  I don’t expect you to think Gopher Prairie is a paradise, after St. Paul.  I don’t expect you to be crazy about it, at first.  But you’ll come to like it so much—­life’s so free here and best people on earth.”

She whispered to him (while Mrs. Clark considerately turned away), “I love you for understanding.  I’m just—­I’m beastly over-sensitive.  Too many books.  It’s my lack of shoulder-muscles and sense.  Give me time, dear.”

“You bet!  All the time you want!”

She laid the back of his hand against her cheek, snuggled near him.  She was ready for her new home.

Kennicott had told her that, with his widowed mother as housekeeper, he had occupied an old house, “but nice and roomy, and well-heated, best furnace I could find on the market.”  His mother had left Carol her love, and gone back to Lac-qui-Meurt.

It would be wonderful, she exulted, not to have to live in Other People’s Houses, but to make her own shrine.  She held his hand tightly and stared ahead as the car swung round a corner and stopped in the street before a prosaic frame house in a small parched lawn.

IV