ire-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!"

"That must have been