horse-trading trip, clear into Idaho."

"Yes, and I may go!"

"How's tricks? Crazy about the town yet?"

"No, but I probably shall be, some day."

"Don't let 'em get you. Kick 'em in the face!"

He shouted at her while he worked. The pile of stove-wood grew
astonishingly. The pale bark of the poplar sticks was mottled with
lichens of sage-green and dusty gray; the newly sawed ends were
fresh-colored, with the agreeable roughness of a woolen muffler. To the
sterile winter air the wood gave a scent of March sap.

Kennicott telephoned that he was going into the country. Bjornstam had
not finished his work at noon, and she invited him to have dinner with
Bea in the kitchen. She wished that she were independent enough to dine
with these her guests. She considered their friendliness, she sneered at
"social distinctions," she raged at her own taboos--and she continued
to regard them as retainers and herself as a lady. She sat in the
dining-room and listened through the door to Bjornstam's booming and
Bea's giggles. She was the more absurd to herself in that, after the
rite of dining alone, she could go out to the kitchen, lean against the
sink, and talk to them.

They were attracted to each other; a Swedish Othello and Desdemona, more
useful and amiable than their prototypes. Bjornstam told his scapes:
selling horses in a Montana mining-camp, breaking a log-jam, being
impertinent to a "two-fisted" millionaire lumberman. Bea gurgled "Oh
my!" and kept his coffee cup filled.

He took a long time to finish the wood. He had frequently to go into the
kitchen to get warm. Carol heard him confiding to Bea, "You're a darn
nice Swede girl. I guess if I had a woman like you I wouldn't be such
a sorehead. Gosh, your kitchen is clean; makes an old bach feel sloppy.
Say, that's nice hair you got. Huh? Me fresh? Saaaay, girl, if I ever do
get fresh, you'll know it. Why, I could pick you up with one finger,
and hold you in the air long enough to read Robert J. Ingersoll clean
through. Ingersoll? Oh, he's a religious writer. Sure. You'd like him
fine."

When he drove off he waved to Bea; and Carol, lonely at the window
above, was envious of their pastoral.

"And I----But I will go on."

CHAPTER XVII

I

THEY were driving down the lake to the cottages that moonlit January
night, twenty of them in the bob-sled. They sang "Toy Land" and "Seeing
Nelly Home"; they leaped from the low back of the sled to race over the
slippery s