They drove from the natural prairie to a cleared district which twenty years ago had been forest.  The country seemed to stretch unchanging to the North Pole:  low hill, brush-scraggly bottom, reedy creek, muskrat mound, fields with frozen brown clods thrust up through the snow.

Her ears and nose were pinched; her breath frosted her collar; her fingers ached.

“Getting colder,” she said.

“Yup.”

That was all their conversation for three miles.  Yet she was happy.

They reached Nels Erdstrom’s at four, and with a throb she recognized the courageous venture which had lured her to Gopher Prairie:  the cleared fields, furrows among stumps, a log cabin chinked with mud and roofed with dry hay.  But Nels had prospered.  He used the log cabin as a barn; and a new house reared up, a proud, unwise, Gopher Prairie house, the more naked and ungraceful in its glossy white paint and pink trimmings.  Every tree had been cut down.  The house was so unsheltered, so battered by the wind, so bleakly thrust out into the harsh clearing, that Carol shivered.  But they were welcomed warmly enough in the kitchen, with its crisp new plaster, its black and nickel range, its cream separator in a corner.

Mrs. Erdstrom begged her to sit in the parlor, where there was a phonograph and an oak and leather davenport, the prairie farmer’s proofs of social progress, but she dropped down by the kitchen stove and insisted, “Please don’t mind me.”  When Mrs. Erdstrom had followed the doctor out of the room Carol glanced in a friendly way at the grained pine cupboard, the framed Lutheran Konfirmations Attest, the traces of fried eggs and sausages on the dining table against the wall, and a jewel among calendars, presenting not only a lithographic young woman with cherry lips, and a Swedish advertisement of Axel Egge’s grocery, but also a thermometer and a match-holder.

She saw that a boy of four or five was staring at her from the hall, a boy in gingham shirt and faded corduroy trousers, but large-eyed, firm-mouthed, wide-browed.  He vanished, then peeped in again, biting his knuckles, turning his shoulder toward her in shyness.

Didn’t she remember—­what was it?—­Kennicott sitting beside her at Fort Snelling, urging, “See how scared that baby is.  Needs some woman like you.”

Magic had fluttered about her then—­magic of sunset and cool air and the curiosity of lovers.  She held out her hands as much to that sanctity as to the boy.

He edged into the room, doubtfully sucking his thumb.

“Hello,” she said.  “What’s your name?”

“Hee, hee, hee!”

“You’re quite right.  I agree with you.  Silly people like me always ask children their names.”

“Hee, hee, hee!”

“Come here and I’ll tell you the story of—­well, I don’t know what it will be about, but it will have a slim heroine and a Prince Charming.”

He stood stoically while she spun nonsense.  His giggling ceased.  She was winning him.  Then the telephone bell—­two long rings, one short.