- Alexandra is walking with Carl across the fields. After receiving his telegram in Lincoln, she left around midnight, arriving back inHanover in the early morning.
- Alexandra has taken off her black travelling suit and is wearing a white dress.
- Carl looks more or less the same, only a little more tanned. Still, he hardly looks like a businessman.
- "There will always be dreamers on the frontier," the narrator muses (5.3.2).
- It turns out Carl had never received her letter. He heard about Frank's trial when he read about it in a newspaper. Since then, he's been on his way to Hanover.
- Alexandra asks whether Carl could just up and leave his business. He reassures her that he trusts his partner to manage everything. He'll have to go back in the spring, and maybe she'll come with him this time. He's even started to make some money.
- He asks her whether she wants to wait longer, because of the recent events. She says it makes no difference to her; and Carl doesn't need to worry about Lou and Oscar, since they're angrier now about Emil, claiming that it's Alexandra's fault for sending him to college.
- Carl assures her that he's not worried. He knew that she needed him there, so he came for her.
- Alexandra tells him how much she needed him when Emil was killed, and then how she thought she should spend the rest of her days alone. When she got his telegram, everything changed. He's all she has in the world, now.
- When Alexandra tells Carl how shocked she is by Marie's betrayal of her trust, Carl suggests that it might have been harder for Marie than Alexandra thinks. He tells her how he noticed something strange between Marie and Emil when he went with Emil to the fair at the French church. He also tells her how he saw the two of them at the duck pond, early that one morning.
- Some women, he tells her, spread ruin just by being "too beautiful, too full of life and love" (5.3.13). She shouldn't be so hard on Marie.
- Alexandra says she tries, but she still doesn't understand why it had to be Emil, and not one of the other boys.
- Because he was the best, and she was the best, he tells her. Maybe they were too good for the world.
- They continue walking. Alexandra tells Carl that she wants to come with him to Alaska in the spring. But she's not sure she wants to leave for good.
- When she left the prison, she tells him, she felt like she'd never be free again. But she does feel free, there on the Divide.
- Carl tells her that she belongs to the land, just as she always has.
- Alexandra agrees. She asks Carl if he remembers something he said when they visited the graveyard, about the same human stories, repeating over and over. Well, Alexandra says, they are the ones who write the stories.
- Lou and Oscar don't understand, she continues. They're not the ones who own the land. They belong to the land. The ones who love and understand the land are the ones who get to own it for a while.
- Carl asks her why she's thinking about all this. She tells him that she had a dream before she went to visit Frank in Lincoln. She says she'll tell him all about it when they're married.
- She realizes now that the dream will never come true, at least not in the way she thought it could.
- Carl kisses her. She leans on his shoulder, telling him how tired and lonely she's been all this time.
- They go inside, leaving the Divide behind them.