Through early autumn Fern Mullins was the only person who broke the suspense.  The frivolous teacher had come to accept Carol as of her own youth, and though school had begun she rushed in daily to suggest dances, welsh-rabbit parties.

Fern begged her to go as chaperon to a barn-dance in the country, on a Saturday evening.  Carol could not go.  The next day, the storm crashed.

CHAPTER XXXII

I

Carol was on the back porch, tightening a bolt on the baby’s go-cart, this Sunday afternoon.  Through an open window of the Bogart house she heard a screeching, heard Mrs. Bogart’s haggish voice: 

" . . . did too, and there’s no use your denying it no you don’t, you march yourself right straight out of the house . . . never in my life heard of such . . . never had nobody talk to me like . . . walk in the ways of sin and nastiness . . . leave your clothes here, and heaven knows that’s more than you deserve . . . any of your lip or I’ll call the policeman.”

The voice of the other interlocutor Carol did not catch, nor, though Mrs. Bogart was proclaiming that he was her confidant and present assistant, did she catch the voice of Mrs. Bogart’s God.

“Another row with Cy,” Carol inferred.

She trundled the go-cart down the back steps and tentatively wheeled it across the yard, proud of her repairs.  She heard steps on the sidewalk.  She saw not Cy Bogart but Fern Mullins, carrying a suit-case, hurrying up the street with her head low.  The widow, standing on the porch with buttery arms akimbo, yammered after the fleeing girl: 

“And don’t you dare show your face on this block again.  You can send the drayman for your trunk.  My house has been contaminated long enough.  Why the Lord should afflict me——­”

Fern was gone.  The righteous widow glared, banged into the house, came out poking at her bonnet, marched away.  By this time Carol was staring in a manner not visibly to be distinguished from the window-peeping of the rest of Gopher Prairie.  She saw Mrs. Bogart enter the Howland house, then the Casses’.  Not till suppertime did she reach the Kennicotts.  The doctor answered her ring, and greeted her, “Well, well? how’s the good neighbor?”

The good neighbor charged into the living-room, waving the most unctuous of black kid gloves and delightedly sputtering: 

“You may well ask how I am!  I really do wonder how I could go through the awful scenes of this day—­and the impudence I took from that woman’s tongue, that ought to be cut out——­”

“Whoa!  Whoa!  Hold up!” roared Kennicott.  “Who’s the hussy, Sister Bogart?  Sit down and take it cool and tell us about it.”