For a moment Wilbur and Moran looked back without speaking. They stood on the quarter-deck; in the shadow of the main-sail, shut off from the sight of the schooner's crew, and for the instant quite alone.
“Well, Moran, it's good-by to the old places, isn't it?” said Wilbur at length.
“Yes,” she said, her deep voice pitched even deeper than usual. “Mate, great things have happened there.”
“It doesn't look like a place for a Tong row with Chinese pirates, though, does it?” he said; but even as he spoke the words, he guessed that that was not what he meant.
“Oh, what did that amount to?” she said, with an impatient movement of her head. “It was there that I first knew myself; and knew that, after all, you were a man and I was a woman; and that there was just us—you and I—in the world; and that you loved me and I loved you, and that nothing else was worth thinking of.”
Wilbur shut his hand down over hers as it gripped a spoke of the wheel.
“Moran, I knew that long since,” he said. “Such a month as this has been! Why, I feel as though I had only begun to live since I began to love you.”
“And you do, mate?” she answered—“you do love me, and always will? Oh, you don't know,” she went on, interrupting his answer, “you haven't a guess, how the last two days have changed me. Something has happened here”—and she put both her hands over her breast. “I'm all different here, mate. It's all you inside here—all you! And it hurts, and I'm proud that it does hurt. Oh!” she cried, of a sudden, “I don't know how to love yet, and I do it very badly, and I can't tell you how I feel, because I can't even tell it to myself. But you must be good to me now.” The deep voice trembled a little. “Good to me, mate, and true to me, mate, because I've only you, and all of me is yours. Mate, be good to me, and always be kind to me. I'm not Moran any more. I'm not proud and strong and independent, and I don't want to be lonely. I want you—I want you always with me. I'm just a woman now, dear—just a woman that loves you with a heart she's just found.”
Wilbur could find no words to answer. There was something so pathetic and at the same time so noble in Moran's complete surrender of herself, and her dependence upon him, her unquestioned trust in him and his goodness, that he was suddenly smitten with awe at the sacredness of the obligation thus imposed on him. She was his now, to have and to hold, to keep, to protect, and to defend—she who was once so glorious of her strength, of her savage isolation, her inviolate, pristine maidenhood. All words seemed futile and inadequate to him.
She came close to him, and put her hands upon his shoulders, and, looking him squarely in the eye, said: