ide, Ray and his mother, and Miss
Greene, an unidentified girl from Minneapolis; all playing parcheesi,
explaining that they thought it not quite proper to play cards on
Sunday, but that parcheesi was "different." Ray winked at Carl as they
said it.

The general atmosphere was easy and livable. Carl found himself at
home again. Adelaide told funny anecdotes about her school of domestic
science, and the chief teacher, who wore her hair in a walnut on top
of her head and interrupted a lecture on dietetics to chase a
cockroach with a ruler.

As the others began to disappear, Gertie said to Carl: "Don't go till
I read you a letter from Ben Rusk I got yesterday. Lots of news from
home. Joe Jordan is engaged!"

They were left alone. Gertie glanced at him intimately. He stiffened.
He knew that Gertie was honest, kindly, with enough sense of display
to catch the tricks of a new environment. But to her, matrimony would
be the inevitable sequence of a friendship which Ruth or Olive could
take easily, pleasantly, for its own sake. And Carl, the young man
just starting in business, was un-heroically afraid of matrimony.

Yet his stiffness of attitude disappeared when Gertie had read the
letter from Joralemon and mused, chin on hand, dreamily melancholy: "I
can just see them out sleighing. Sometimes I wish I was out there.
Honest, Carl, for all the sea and the hills here, don't you wish
sometimes it were August, and you were out home camping on a wooded
bluff over a lake?"

"Yes!" he cried. "I've been away so long now that I don't ever feel
homesick for any particular part of the country; but just the same I
would like to see the lakes. And I do miss the prairies sometimes. Oh,
I was reading something the other day--fellow was trying to define the
different sorts of terrain--here it is, cut it out of the paper." He
produced from among a bunch of pocket-worn envelopes and memorandums a
clipping hacked from a newspaper with a nail-file, and read:

"'The combat and mystery of the sea; the uplift of the hills and their
promise of wonder beyond; the kindliness of late afternoon nestling in
small fields, or on ample barns where red clover-tops and long grasses
shine against the gray foundation stones and small boys seek for
hidden entrances to this castle of the farm; the deep holiness of the
forest, whose leaves are the stained glass of a cathedral to grave
saints of the open; all these I love, but nowhere do I find content
save