Alice did not blame Ned Currie for what had happened in the moonlight in the field, but felt that she could never marry another man.  To her the thought of giving to another what she still felt could belong only to Ned seemed monstrous.  When other young men tried to attract her attention she would have nothing to do with them.  “I am his wife and shall remain his wife whether he comes back or not,” she whispered to herself, and for all of her willingness to support herself could not have understood the growing modern idea of a woman’s owning herself and giving and taking for her own ends in life.

Alice worked in the dry goods store from eight in the morning until six at night and on three evenings a week went back to the store to stay from seven until nine.  As time passed and she became more and more lonely she began to practice the devices common to lonely people.  When at night she went upstairs into her own room she knelt on the floor to pray and in her prayers whispered things she wanted to say to her lover.  She became attached to inanimate objects, and because it was her own, could not bare to have anyone touch the furniture of her room.  The trick of saving money, begun for a purpose, was carried on after the scheme of going to the city to find Ned Currie had been given up.  It became a fixed habit, and when she needed new clothes she did not get them.  Sometimes on rainy afternoons in the store she got out her bank book and, letting it lie open before her, spent hours dreaming impossible dreams of saving money enough so that the interest would support both herself and her future husband.

“Ned always liked to travel about,” she thought.  “I’ll give him the chance.  Some day when we are married and I can save both his money and my own, we will be rich.  Then we can travel together all over the world.”

In the dry goods store weeks ran into months and months into years as Alice waited and dreamed of her lover’s return.  Her employer, a grey old man with false teeth and a thin grey mustache that drooped down over his mouth, was not given to conversation, and sometimes, on rainy days and in the winter when a storm raged in Main Street, long hours passed when no customers came in.  Alice arranged and rearranged the stock.  She stood near the front window where she could look down the deserted street and thought of the evenings when she had walked with Ned Currie and of what he had said.  “We will have to stick to each other now.”  The words echoed and re-echoed through the mind of the maturing woman.  Tears came into her eyes.  Sometimes when her employer had gone out and she was alone in the store she put her head on the counter and wept.  “Oh, Ned, I am waiting,” she whispered over and over, and all the time the creeping fear that he would never come back grew stronger within her.