He had been telling her of an oratorical contest in which he had borne a part, and, with a sudden tenderness in his voice, had said, “I wished a hundred times, while I was preparing my speech, that I could go over it with you. Do you remember how you always used to let me orate to you when I had anything on hand for the rhetoricals? It must have been an awful bore, but somehow I never felt as if I could go on the stage without your help.”
“And you see you didn’t need it after all,” she said, looking away. “You won the medal without me.”
“Oh, but it wasn’t without you,” he said, leaning toward her and speaking low, “for I was thinking all the time what you would say if I won.”
Ah, he could not have said a word like that if some other girl had stolen her place away!
The talk was over at last, and the supper too, the good substantial supper which was always spread at the Elwells’. She could go now. There was no formality to insist that having eaten she must stay still longer, and she wanted Morton to herself. She was quite ready for it now, and he would go home with her of course.
They had come back, with all the new meaning of it for each, to the old frankness and freedom, and yet as they took the familiar path across the fields, in the gathering dusk, it was not easy to speak the thought that filled both their hearts. They talked for a little while of indifferent things—of the lengthening days, of the buds swelling on the willows, of the new buildings rising on a neighbor’s place. Then, all at once the moon, the friendly moon, so kind in all its wanderings to the needs of lovers, rose up in the sky. It was a new moon, and they saw it at the same moment over their right shoulders.
“We must wish a wish, as we used to when we were children,” said Esther, gayly.
There could never be another moment like this. He stood suddenly still, and his eyes looked into hers. “Esther,” he said, “it seems to me I have only one wish in the world, it is so much dearer than all the others. If I could know, if I could surely know—” and then he stopped. That swelling at his throat which had choked him once before mastered his voice again, not from fear now, but hope.
She waited an instant, then, as her hand slipped into his, whispered, “Do you mean me, Mort? Oh, do you mean me?”
It had never taken any one so long to cross that field as it did those two to cross the little space that was left. There was no bar to speech now, and there was so much to say! He said to her presently, with a note of perplexity in his voice, “Esther, I have never understood why you gave up going to Boston this winter. You certainly wanted very much to go at first.”