“Waiting—­waiting—­everything is waiting,” she whispered.  She drew her hand from his, pressed her clenched fingers against her lips.  She was lost in the somberness.  “I am happy—­so we must go home, before we have time to become unhappy.  But can’t we sit on a log for a minute and just listen?”

“No.  Too wet.  But I wish we could build a fire, and you could sit on my overcoat beside it.  I’m a grand fire-builder!  My cousin Lars and me spent a week one time in a cabin way up in the Big Woods, snowed in.  The fireplace was filled with a dome of ice when we got there, but we chopped it out, and jammed the thing full of pine-boughs.  Couldn’t we build a fire back here in the woods and sit by it for a while?”

She pondered, half-way between yielding and refusal.  Her head ached faintly.  She was in abeyance.  Everything, the night, his silhouette, the cautious-treading future, was as undistinguishable as though she were drifting bodiless in a Fourth Dimension.  While her mind groped, the lights of a motor car swooped round a bend in the road, and they stood farther apart.  “What ought I to do?” she mused.  “I think——­Oh, I won’t be robbed!  I am good!  If I’m so enslaved that I can’t sit by the fire with a man and talk, then I’d better be dead!”

The lights of the thrumming car grew magically; were upon them; abruptly stopped.  From behind the dimness of the windshield a voice, annoyed, sharp:  “Hello there!”

She realized that it was Kennicott.

The irritation in his voice smoothed out.  “Having a walk?”

They made schoolboyish sounds of assent.

“Pretty wet, isn’t it?  Better ride back.  Jump up in front here, Valborg.”

His manner of swinging open the door was a command.  Carol was conscious that Erik was climbing in, that she was apparently to sit in the back, and that she had been left to open the rear door for herself.  Instantly the wonder which had flamed to the gusty skies was quenched, and she was Mrs. W. P. Kennicott of Gopher Prairie, riding in a squeaking old car, and likely to be lectured by her husband.

She feared what Kennicott would say to Erik.  She bent toward them.  Kennicott was observing, “Going to have some rain before the night ’s over, all right.”

“Yes,” said Erik.

“Been funny season this year, anyway.  Never saw it with such a cold October and such a nice November.  ’Member we had a snow way back on October ninth!  But it certainly was nice up to the twenty-first, this month—­as I remember it, not a flake of snow in November so far, has there been?  But I shouldn’t wonder if we’d be having some snow ’most any time now.”

“Yes, good chance of it,” said Erik.

“Wish I’d had more time to go after the ducks this fall.  By golly, what do you think?” Kennicott sounded appealing.  “Fellow wrote me from Man Trap Lake that he shot seven mallards and couple of canvas-back in one hour!”