neck, grooved by hitching-straps, tickled one’s fingers.  Carol had never been awake to the earth except as a show of changing color and great satisfying masses; she had lived in people and in ideas about having ideas; but Hugh’s questions made her attentive to the comedies of sparrows, robins, blue jays, yellowhammers; she regained her pleasure in the arching flight of swallows, and added to it a solicitude about their nests and family squabbles.

She forgot her seasons of boredom.  She said to Hugh, “We’re two fat disreputable old minstrels roaming round the world,” and he echoed her, “Roamin’ round—­roamin’ round.”

The high adventure, the secret place to which they both fled joyously, was the house of Miles and Bea and Olaf Bjornstam.

Kennicott steadily disapproved of the Bjornstams.  He protested, “What do you want to talk to that crank for?” He hinted that a former “Swede hired girl” was low company for the son of Dr. Will Kennicott.  She did not explain.  She did not quite understand it herself; did not know that in the Bjornstams she found her friends, her club, her sympathy and her ration of blessed cynicism.  For a time the gossip of Juanita Haydock and the Jolly Seventeen had been a refuge from the droning of Aunt Bessie, but the relief had not continued.  The young matrons made her nervous.  They talked so loud, always so loud.  They filled a room with clashing cackle; their jests and gags they repeated nine times over.  Unconsciously, she had discarded the Jolly Seventeen, Guy Pollock, Vida, and every one save Mrs. Dr. Westlake and the friends whom she did not clearly know as friends—­the Bjornstams.

To Hugh, the Red Swede was the most heroic and powerful person in the world.  With unrestrained adoration he trotted after while Miles fed the cows, chased his one pig—­an animal of lax and migratory instincts—­or dramatically slaughtered a chicken.  And to Hugh, Olaf was lord among mortal men, less stalwart than the old monarch, King Miles, but more understanding of the relations and values of things, of small sticks, lone playing-cards, and irretrievably injured hoops.

Carol saw, though she did not admit, that Olaf was not only more beautiful than her own dark child, but more gracious.  Olaf was a Norse chieftain:  straight, sunny-haired, large-limbed, resplendently amiable to his subjects.  Hugh was a vulgarian; a bustling business man.  It was Hugh that bounced and said “Let’s play”; Olaf that opened luminous blue eyes and agreed “All right,” in condescending gentleness.  If Hugh batted him—­and Hugh did bat him—­Olaf was unafraid but shocked.  In magnificent solitude he marched toward the house, while Hugh bewailed his sin and the overclouding of august favor.

The two friends played with an imperial chariot which Miles had made out of a starch-box and four red spools; together they stuck switches into a mouse-hole, with vast satisfaction though entirely without known results.