I'll be that at first. I expect it--but people
get over that. And it is not as if I were going away for good. I'll be
back next summer--every summer."

"It'll be different," said Rob stubbornly, thinking as old Nathan
Shelley had thought. "You'll be a fine lady--oh, all the better for
that perhaps--but you'll not be the same. No, no, the new life will
change you; not all at once, maybe, but in the end. You'll be one of
them, not one of us. But will you be happy? That's the question I'm
asking."

In anyone else Nora would have resented this. But she never felt angry
with Rob.

"I think I shall be," she said thoughtfully. "And, anyway, I must go.
It doesn't seem as if I could help myself if I wanted to.
Something--out beyond there--is calling me, always has been calling me
ever since I was a tiny girl and found out there was a big world far
away from Racicot. And it always seemed to me that I would find a way
to it some day. That was why I kept going to school long after the
other girls stopped. Mother thought I'd better stop home; she said too
much book learning would make me discontented and too different from
the people I had to live along. But Father let me go; he understood;
he said I was like him when he was young. I learned everything and
read everything I could. It seems to me as if I had been walking along
a narrow pathway all my life. And now it seems as if a gate were
opened before me and I can pass through into a wider world. It isn't
the luxury and the pleasure or the fine house and dresses that tempt
me, though the people here think so--even Mother thinks so. But it is
not. It's just that something seems to be in my grasp that I've always
longed for, and I must go--Rob, I must go."

"Yes, if you feel like that you must go," he answered, looking down at
her troubled face gently. "And it's best for you to go, Nora. I
believe that, and I'm not so selfish as not to be able to hope that
you'll find all you long for. But it will change you all the more if
it is so. Nora! Nora! Whatever am I going to do without you!"

The sudden passion bursting out in his tone frightened her.

"Don't, Rob, don't! And you won't miss me long. There's many another."

"No, there isn't. Don't fling me that dry bone of comfort. There's no
other, and never has been any other--none but you, Nora, and well you
know it."

"I'm sorry," she said faintly.

"You needn't be," said Rob grimly. "After all, I'd rather love you
than not