Adventure - Page 2

and went for
a drive in the country. The moon came up and they found
themselves unable to talk. In his sadness the young man
forgot the resolutions he had made regarding his
conduct with the girl.

They got out of the buggy at a place where a long
meadow ran down to the bank of Wine Creek and there in
the dim light became lovers. When at midnight they
returned to town they were both glad. It did not seem
to them that anything that could happen in the future
could blot out the wonder and beauty of the thing that
had happened. "Now we will have to stick to each other,
whatever happens we will have to do that," Ned Currie
said as he left the girl at her father's door.

The young newspaper man did not succeed in getting a
place on a Cleveland paper and went west to Chicago.
For a time he was lonely and wrote to Alice almost
every day. Then he was caught up by the life of the
city; he began to make friends and found new interests
in life. In Chicago he boarded at a house where there
were several women. One of them attracted his attention
and he forgot Alice in Winesburg. At the end of a year
he had stopped writing letters, and only once in a long
time, when he was lonely or when he went into one of
the city parks and saw the moon shining on the grass as
it had shone that night on the meadow by Wine Creek,
did he think of her at all.

In Winesburg the girl who had been loved grew to be a
woman. When she was twenty-two years old her father,
who owned a harness repair shop, died suddenly. The
harness maker was an old soldier, and after a few
months his wife received a widow's pension. She used
the first money she got to buy a loom and became a
weaver of carpets, and Alice got a place in Winney's
store. For a number of years nothing could have induced
her to believe that Ned Currie would not in the end
return to her.

She was glad to be employed because the daily round of
toil in the store made the time of waiting seem less
long and uninteresting. She began to save money,
thinking that when she had saved two or three hundred
dollars she would follow her lover to the city and try
if her presence would not win back his affections.

Alice did not blame Ned Currie for what had happened in
the moonlight in the field, but felt that she could
never marry another man. To her the thought of giving
to another what she still felt could belong only to Ned
seemed monstrous. When other young men tried to attract
her attention she would have nothing to do with them.
"I am his wife and shall remain his wife whether he
comes back or not," she whispered to herself, and for
all of her willingness to support herself could not