He left her at her gate. The memory of all the times they had stood there was the last unbearable pain. They held each other tight, without speaking.
"You—haven't said—tell me you—love me," he stammered after a long time.
"I love you," she said, as though it were a sacrament. He was silent for another moment, and in the dim starlight she felt rather than saw a strange, half-terrifying expression on his face.
"Will you go away with me—right now—and marry me—if I ask you to?" His voice was hoarse.
She felt that she was taking all she was or could be in her cupped hands and offering it to him.
"Yes," she said.
His whole body shook with a long sob. He tried to say something, choking, tearing himself roughly away from her. She saw him going down the road, almost running, and then the darkness hid him.
In the days that followed it seemed to her that she could have borne the separation better if she had not been left behind. He had gone down the shining lines of track beyond Cherokee Hill into a vague big world that baffled her thoughts. He wrote that he had been in San Francisco and taken a ride on a sight-seeing car. It was a splendid place, he said; he wished she could see the things he saw. He had seen Chinatown, the Presidio, the beach, and Seal Rocks. Then he had gone on to Ripley, which wasn't much like Masonville. He was well, and hoped she was, and he thought of her every day and was hers lovingly. Paul. But she felt that she was losing touch with him, and when she contemplated two or three long years of waiting she felt that she would lose him entirely. She thought again of that young couple at Rollo, and pangs of envy were added to the misery in which she was living.
He had been gone two weeks when she announced to her mother that she was going to be a telegraph-operator. She held to the determination with a tenacity that surprised even herself. She argued, she pleaded, she pointed out the wages she would earn, the money she could send home. There was a notice in the Masonville weekly paper, advertising a school of telegraphy in Sacramento, saying: "Operators in great demand. Graduates earn $75 to $100 a month up." She wrote to that school, and immediately a reply came, assuring her that she could learn in three months, that railroad and telegraph companies were clamoring for operators, that the school guaranteed all its graduates good positions. The tuition was fifty dollars.