"True; your fair conscience would let you do nothing less. And yet, there are words so slight that they would cost you scarcely anything, while to me they would be coats of mail."
For a time there was silence, both looking out over the street where the school children were passing homewards. A buggy rattled by, throwing clouds of dust; then there was quiet again. "If you could say to me, Dorothy, 'Dick, I won't marry anyone until I see you again, until I come home again. And I'll try to like you—that way,' why, that would be enough for me."
She held up her right hand with a pretty little gesture. "I do solemnly swear," she said. Then she went on more seriously, "Why, yes, Dick, I'll promise that. Small chance of my getting married for a few years, anyway, so I won't have such a very awful time living up to that promise. Now, do you think, sir, that you're engaged to me?"
"No, no, dear; not at all. But you've let me hope, haven't you? That's all I want. You don't know how much happier I'll feel all the time you're away. How long, by the way, do you think you'll be abroad?"
"A year, at the least. I want to see it all, you know, when I do get the chance. Mamma'll want to stay in Carlsbad or Ems, or somewhere all the time; but I'm going to get her well real soon, you see if I don't, and then we'll just travel for fun and nothing else. Dick, wouldn't it be great if you could go along?"
"It would, for a fact," he assented, "but it's too good to be true. Besides I'm going to have some fun of my own!"
"Your work, you mean?"
"Yes. Isn't it fun to succeed? And I'm going to succeed! The fighting for success will be fun, and the victory will be fun!" His eyes flashed with a fierce battle-light. Today this fire of ambition is the only thing that at all takes the place of the blood fervor that spurred on the knights of the olden times. "Dorothy," he said, presently, with a sudden softness in his voice, "will you wish me luck?"
She gave him, for answer, her right hand, and looked at him wistfully. She was wondering, perhaps, why it was that she did not love this lovable boy. "I wish you all the success in the world," she said quietly. And then, as he turned to go, she called after him, in the old formula they had used to each other a thousand times as boy and girl—"Good-bye, Dick. Be good!"
The love affairs of a boy and a girl, you may think, are hardly the things that matter very much in the world of today. But the boy and girl of today are the man and the woman of tomorrow; and between these stages there is only the little gulf, so easily crossed, wherein runs the river of knowledge of the world we live in. As soon as we have crossed that we are become men and women, and are left of our childhood nothing but the wish that it were ours again.