a home that I was driving toward. But it was
one of those crystal-clear prairie nights when the stars were like
electric-lights shining through cut-glass and the air was like a
razor-blade wrapped in panne-velvet. It took you out of yourself. It
reminded you that you were only an infinitely small atom in the
immensity of a crowded big world, and that even your big world was
merely a microscopic little mote lost amid its uncounted millions of
sister-motes in the infinitudes of time and space.

"_Nitchevo!_" I said out loud, as I stopped on the trail to readjust
and wrap the Twins in their rug-lined laundry-basket.

"In that case," Peter unexpectedly remarked, "I'd like to climb into
that front seat with you."

"Why?" I asked, not greatly interested.

"Because I want to talk to you," was Peter's answer.

"But I think I'd rather not talk," I told him.

"Why?" it was his turn to inquire.

"Isn't it a rum enough situation as it is?" I demanded. For Peter,
naturally, had not used his eyes for nothing that night.

But Peter didn't wait for my permission to climb into the front seat.
He plumped himself down beside me and sat there with my first-born in
his arms and one-half of the mangy old buffalo-robe pulled up over his
knees.

"I think I'm beginning to see light," he said, after a rather long
silence, as we went spanking along the prairie-trail with the cold air
fanning our faces.

"I wish _I_ did," I acknowledged.

"You're not very happy, are you?" he ventured, in a voice with just
the slightest trace of _vibrato_ in it.

But I didn't see that anything was to be gained by parading my
troubles before others. And life, of late, had been teaching me to
consume my own smoke. So I kept silent.

"Do you like me, Peter?" I suddenly asked. For I felt absurdly safe
with Peter. He has a heart, I know, as clean as an Alpine village, and
the very sense of his remoteness, as I'd already told him, gives birth
to a sort of intimacy, like the factory girl who throws a kiss to the
brakeman on the through freight and remains Artemis-on-ice to the
delicatessen-youth from whom she buys her supper "weenies."

"What do you suppose I've been hanging around for?" demanded Peter,
with what impressed me as an absence of finesse.

"To fix the windmill, of course," I told him. "Unless you have
improper designs on Struthers!"

He laughed a little and looked up at the Great Bear.

"If it's true, as they say, that Fate weaves in th