The moonlight flooded that great, silent land. The reaped fields lay yellow in it. The straw stacks and poplar windbreaks threw sharp black shadows. The roads were white rivers of dust. The sky was a deep, crystalline blue, and the stars were few and faint. Everything seemed to have succumbed, to have sunk to sleep, under the great, golden, tender, midsummer moon. The splendor of it seemed to transcend human life and human fate. The senses were too feeble to take it in, and every time one looked up at the sky one felt unequal to it, as if one were sitting deaf under the waves of a great river of melody. Near the road, Nils Ericson was lying against a straw stack in Olaf’s wheat-field. His own life seemed strange and unfamiliar to him, as if it were something he had read about, or dreamed, and forgotten. He lay very still, watching the white road that ran in front of him, lost itself among the fields, and then, at a distance, reappeared over a little hill. At last, against this white band he saw something moving rapidly, and he got up and walked to the edge of the field. “She is passing the row of poplars now,” he thought. He heard the padded beat of hoofs along the dusty road, and as she came into sight he stepped out and waved his arms. Then, for fear of frightening the horse, he drew back and waited. Clara had seen him, and she came up at a walk. Nils took the horse by the bit and stroked his neck.
“What are you doing out so late, Clara Vavrika? I went to the house, but Johanna told me you had gone to your father’s.”
“Who can stay in the house on a night like this? Aren’t you out yourself?”
“Ah, but that’s another matter.”
Nils turned the horse into the field.
“What are you doing? Where are you taking Norman?”
“Not far, but I want to talk to you to-night; I have something to say to you. I can’t talk to you at the house, with Olaf sitting there on the porch, weighing a thousand tons.”
Clara laughed. “He won’t be sitting there now. He’s in bed by this time, and asleep—weighing a thousand tons.”
Nils plodded on across the stubble. “Are you really going to spend the rest of your life like this, night after night, summer after summer? Haven’t you anything better to do on a night like this than to wear yourself and Norman out tearing across the country to your father’s and back? Besides, your father won’t live forever, you know. His little place will be shut up or sold, and then you’ll have nobody but the Ericsons. You’ll have to fasten down the hatches for the winter then.”
Clara moved her head restlessly. “Don’t talk about that. I try never to think of it. If I lost father I’d lose everything, even my hold over the Ericsons.”