“And after that?”
“I’m going home.”
“Home?”
“Back to America.”
“Oh,” she said slowly. “I see.” In a moment, she added, “We shall miss you.”
He wanted to talk to her more than he had ever wanted to talk to anyone in his life, but when he spoke all that he could say, lamely, muttering, was:
“I’ll miss you, too.”
“Will you?” She spoke so quietly that he could scarcely hear her. “I wonder for how long?” she said.
“For ever,” he said, flushing miserably at the sound of the word, and yet not knowing any other word to say.
The faint hard smile about her mouth was a little deeper when she spoke again.
“For ever? That’s a long time, when one is young as you,” she said.
“I mean it. I’ll never forget you as long as I live.”
“We shall remember you,” she said quietly. “And I hope you think of us some time—back here, buried, lost, in all the fog and rain and ruin of England. How good it must be to know that you are young in a young country—where nothing that you did yesterday matters very much. How wonderful it must be to know that none of the failure of the past can pull you down—that there will always be another day for you—a new beginning. I wonder if you Americans will ever know how fortunate you are,” the girl said.
“And yet you couldn’t leave all this?” Eugene said with a kind of desperate hope. “This old country you’ve lived in, known all your life. A girl like you could never leave a place like this to live the kind of life we have in America.”
“Couldn’t I?” she said with a quiet but unmistakable passion of conviction. “There’s nothing I’d like better.”
Eugene stared at her blindly, dumbly for a moment; suddenly all that he wanted to say, and had not been able to say, found release in a movement of his hands. He gripped her by the shoulders and pulled her to him, and began to plead with her:
“Then why don’t you? I’ll take you there!—Look here—” his words were crazy and he knew it, but as he spoke them he believed all he said—“
