The Land of Promise: A Comedy in Four Acts (1922)

She looked at him in absolute consternation. Her breath came in hurried gasps. But her heart sang in her breast and the little pathetic droop of her mouth disappeared. Her telltale eyes dropped on her work. Not yet, not yet; she was greedy to hear more.

'I know you now less well than when you'd been only a week up to Ed's.' He resumed his pacing up and down. 'I guess I've lost the trail. I'm just beating round, floundering in the bush.'

'I never knew you wanted love,' she said softly.

'I guess I didn't know it until just lately, either.'

'I suppose parting's always rather painful,' she said with just the beginning of a little smile creeping round the corners of her lips.

'If you go back-- when you go back,' he corrected himself, 'to the old country, I guess--I guess you'll never want to come back.'

'Perhaps you'll come over to England yourself, one of these days. If you only have a couple of good years, you could easily shut up the place and run over for the winter,' she said shyly.

'I guess that would be a dangerous experiment. You'll be a lady in England. I guess I'd still be only the hired man.'

'You'd be my husband.'

'N-o-o-o,' he said, with a shake of the head. 'I guess I wouldn't chance it.'

She tried another way. She was sure of her happiness now; she could play with it a little longer.

'You'll write to me now and then, and tell me how you're getting on, won't you?'

'Will you care to know?' he asked quickly.

'Why, yes, of course I shall.'

'Well,' he said, throwing back his head proudly, 'I'll write and tell you if I'm making good. If I ain't, I guess I shan't feel much like writing.'

'But you will make good, Frank. I know you well enough for that.'

'Do you?' His tone was grateful.

'I have learned to--to respect you during these months we've lived together. You have taught me a great deal. All sorts of qualities which I used to think of great value seem unimportant to me now. I have changed my ideas about many things.'

'We have each learned something, I guess,' he said generously.

Nora gave him a grateful glance. He stood for a moment at the far end of the room and watched her roll up the socks she had just darned. How neat and deft she was. After all, there was something in being a lady, as Mrs. Sharp had said. Neither she nor Gertie, both capable women, could do things in quite the same way that Nora did.

Oh, why had she come into his life at all! She had given him the taste for knowledge, for better things of all sorts; and now she was going away, going away forever. He had no illusions about her ever returning. Not she, once she had escaped from a life she hated. Had she not just said as much when she said that the shack had seemed like a prison to her?

And now, in place of going on in the old way that had always seemed good enough to him before he knew anything better, mulling about, getting his own meals, with only one thought, one ambition in the world--the success of his crops and the acquisition of more land that he might some day in the dim future have a few thousands laid by--he would always be wanting something he could never get without her: more knowledge of the things that made life fuller and wider and broader, the things that she prized and had known from her childhood.

It was cruel and unfair of her to have awakened the desire in him only to abandon him. To have held the cup of knowledge to his lips for one brief instant and then leave him to go through life with his thirst unslaked! Not that she was intentionally cruel. No, he thought he knew all of her little faults of temper and of pride by this. Her heart was too kindly to let her wound him knowingly, witness her tenderness to poor Mrs. Sharp only this afternoon. But