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It was Kennicott who brought up the matter of the Smails at breakfast. With no visible connection, he said, “Uncle Whit is kind of clumsy, but just the same, he’s a pretty wise old coot. He’s certainly making good with the store.”

Carol smiled, and Kennicott was pleased that she had come to her senses. “As Whit says, after all the first thing is to have the inside of a house right, and darn the people on the outside looking in!”

It seemed settled that the house was to be a sound example of the Sam Clark school.

Kennicott made much of erecting it entirely for her and the baby. He spoke of closets for her frocks, and “a comfy sewing-room.” But when he drew on a leaf from an old account-book (he was a papersaver and a string-picker) the plans for the garage, he gave much more attention to a cement floor and a work-bench and a gasoline-tank than he had to sewing-rooms.

She sat back and was afraid.

In the present rookery there were odd things—a step up from the hall to the dining-room, a picturesqueness in the shed and bedraggled lilac bush. But the new place would be smooth, standardized, fixed. It was probable, now that Kennicott was past forty, and settled, that this would be the last venture he would ever make in building. So long as she stayed in this ark, she would always have a possibility of change, but once she was in the new house, there she would sit for all the rest of her life—there she would die. Desperately she wanted to put it off, against the chance of miracles. While Kennicott was chattering about a patent swing-door for the garage she saw the swing-doors of a prison.

She never voluntarily returned to the project. Aggrieved, Kennicott stopped drawing plans, and in ten days the new house was forgotten.

V

Every year since their marriage Carol had longed for a trip through the East. Every year Kennicott had talked of attending the American Medical Association convention, “and then afterwards we could do the East up brown. I know New York clean through—spent pretty near a week there—but I would like to see New England and all these historic places and have some sea-food.” He talked of it from February to May, and in May he invariably decided that coming confinement-cases or land-deals would prevent his “getting away from home-base for very long this year—and no sense going till we can do it right.”

The weariness of dish-washing had increased her desire to go. She pictured herself looking at Emerson’s manse,du bathing in a surf of jade and ivory, wearing a trottoirdv and a summer fur, meeting an aristocratic Stranger. In the spring Kennicott had pathetically volunteered, “S’pose you’d like to get in a good long tour this summer, but with Gould and Mac away and so many patients depending on me, don’t see how I can make it. By golly, I feel like a tightwad though, not taking you.” Through all this restless July after she had tasted Bresnahan’s disturbing flavor of travel and gaiety, she wanted to go, but she said nothing. They spoke of and postponed a trip to the Twin Cities. When she suggested, as though it were a tremendous joke, “I think baby and I might up and leave you, and run off to Cape Cod by ourselves!” his only reaction was “Golly, don’t know but what you may almost have to do that, if we don’t get in a trip next year.”

Toward the end of July he proposed, “Say, the Beavers are holding a convention in Joralemon, street fair and everything. We might go down tomorrow. And I’d like to see Dr. Calibree about some business. Put in the whole day. Might help some to make up for our trip. Fine fellow, Dr. Calibree.”

Joralemon was a prairie town of the size of Gopher Prairie.

Their motor was out of order, and there was no passenger-train at an early hour. They went down by freight-train, after the weighty and conversational business of leaving Hugh with Aunt Bessie. Carol was exultant over this irregular jaunting. It was the first unusual thing, except the glance of Bresnahan, that had happened since the weaning of Hugh. They rode in the caboose, the small