een table, where the flies were singing
lazily above the empty beer-glasses.

Clara shook her head weakly. "No, it wouldn't do. Besides, I am
going now."

"I'm on Eric's mare. Would you be angry if I overtook you?"

Clara looked back and laughed. "You might try and see. I can leave
you if I don't want you. Eric's mare can't keep up with Norman."

Nils went into the bar and attempted to pay his score. Big Joe, six
feet four, with curly yellow hair and mustache, clapped him on the
shoulder. "Not a God-damn a your money go in my drawer, you hear?
Only next time you bring your flute, te-te-te-te-te-ty." Joe wagged
his fingers in imitation of the flute-player's position. "My Clara,
she come all-a-time Sundays an' play for me. She not like to play at
Ericson's place." He shook his yellow curls and laughed. "Not a
God-damn a fun at Ericson's. You come a Sunday. You like-a fun. No
forget de flute." Joe talked very rapidly and always tumbled over
his English. He seldom spoke it to his customers, and had never
learned much.

Nils swung himself into the saddle and trotted to the west end of
the village, where the houses and gardens scattered into
prairie-land and the road turned south. Far ahead of him, in the
declining light, he saw Clara Vavrika's slender figure, loitering on
horseback. He touched his mare with the whip, and shot along the
white, level road, under the reddening sky. When he overtook Olaf's
wife he saw that she had been crying. "What's the matter, Clara
Vavrika?" he asked kindly.

"Oh, I get blue sometimes. It was awfully jolly living there with
father. I wonder why I ever went away."

Nils spoke in a low, kind tone that he sometimes used with women:
"That's what I've been wondering these many years. You were the last
girl in the country I'd have picked for a wife for Olaf. What made
you do it, Clara?"

"I suppose I really did it to oblige the neighbors"--Clara tossed
her head. "People were beginning to wonder."

"To wonder?"

"Yes--why I didn't get married. I suppose I didn't like to keep them
in suspense. I've discovered that most girls marry out of
consideration for the neighborhood."

Nils bent his head toward her and his white teeth flashed. "I'd have
gambled that one girl I knew would say, 'Let the neighborhood be
damned.'"

Clara shook her head mournfully. "You see, they have it on you,
Nils; that is, if you're a woman. They say you're beginning to go
off. That's what makes us get married