She whispered to him (while Mrs. Clark considerately turned away), "I
love you for understanding. I'm just--I'm beastly over-sensitive. Too
many books. It's my lack of shoulder-muscles and sense. Give me time,
dear."

"You bet! All the time you want!"

She laid the back of his hand against her cheek, snuggled near him. She
was ready for her new home.

Kennicott had told her that, with his widowed mother as housekeeper, he
had occupied an old house, "but nice and roomy, and well-heated, best
furnace I could find on the market." His mother had left Carol her love,
and gone back to Lac-qui-Meurt.

It would be wonderful, she exulted, not to have to live in Other
People's Houses, but to make her own shrine. She held his hand tightly
and stared ahead as the car swung round a corner and stopped in the
street before a prosaic frame house in a small parched lawn.



IV


A concrete sidewalk with a "parking" of grass and mud. A square smug
brown house, rather damp. A narrow concrete walk up to it. Sickly yellow
leaves in a windrow with dried wings of box-elder seeds and snags
of wool from the cotton-woods. A screened porch with pillars of thin
painted pine surmounted by scrolls and brackets and bumps of jigsawed