They lurched to the highroad and awoke from their sun-soaked drowse at the sound of the clopping hoofs.  They paused to look for partridges in a rim of woods, little woods, very clean and shiny and gay, silver birches and poplars with immaculate green trunks, encircling a lake of sandy bottom, a splashing seclusion demure in the welter of hot prairie.

Kennicott brought down a fat red squirrel and at dusk he had a dramatic shot at a flight of ducks whirling down from the upper air, skimming the lake, instantly vanishing.

They drove home under the sunset.  Mounds of straw, and wheat-stacks like bee-hives, stood out in startling rose and gold, and the green-tufted stubble glistened.  As the vast girdle of crimson darkened, the fulfilled land became autumnal in deep reds and browns.  The black road before the buggy turned to a faint lavender, then was blotted to uncertain grayness.  Cattle came in a long line up to the barred gates of the farmyards, and over the resting land was a dark glow.

Carol had found the dignity and greatness which had failed her in Main Street.

II

Till they had a maid they took noon dinner and six o’clock supper at Mrs. Gurrey’s boarding-house.

Mrs. Elisha Gurrey, relict of Deacon Gurrey the dealer in hay and grain, was a pointed-nosed, simpering woman with iron-gray hair drawn so tight that it resembled a soiled handkerchief covering her head.  But she was unexpectedly cheerful, and her dining-room, with its thin tablecloth on a long pine table, had the decency of clean bareness.

In the line of unsmiling, methodically chewing guests, like horses at a manger, Carol came to distinguish one countenance:  the pale, long, spectacled face and sandy pompadour hair of Mr. Raymond P. Wutherspoon, known as “Raymie,” professional bachelor, manager and one half the sales-force in the shoe-department of the Bon Ton Store.

“You will enjoy Gopher Prairie very much, Mrs. Kennicott,” petitioned Raymie.  His eyes were like those of a dog waiting to be let in out of the cold.  He passed the stewed apricots effusively.  “There are a great many bright cultured people here.  Mrs. Wilks, the Christian Science reader, is a very bright woman—­though I am not a Scientist myself, in fact I sing in the Episcopal choir.  And Miss Sherwin of the high school—­she is such a pleasing, bright girl—­I was fitting her to a pair of tan gaiters yesterday, I declare, it really was a pleasure.”

“Gimme the butter, Carrie,” was Kennicott’s comment.  She defied him by encouraging Raymie: 

“Do you have amateur dramatics and so on here?”

“Oh yes!  The town’s just full of talent.  The Knights of Pythias put on a dandy minstrel show last year.”

“It’s nice you’re so enthusiastic.”