“Yes,” she said, “I know it must be very beautiful; but I hadn't supposed--and yet I ought--”
“No, dearest, no! It was I who was to blame, for not being clearer from the first. But that is the way with us. We can't imagine any people willing to live anywhere else when once they have seen Altruria; and I have told you so much of it, and we have talked of it together so often, that I must have forgotten you had not actually known it. But listen, Eveleth. We will agree to this: After we have been a year in Altruria, if you wish to return to America I will come back and live with you here.”
“No, indeed!” she answered, generously. “If you are to be my husband,” and here she began with the solemn words of the Bible, so beautiful in their quaint English, “'whither thou goest, I will go, and I will not return from following after thee. Thy country shall be my country, and thy God my God.”
I caught her to my heart, in a rapture of tenderness, and the evening that had begun for us so forbiddingly ended in a happiness such as not even our love had known before. I insisted upon the conditions I had made, as to our future home, and she agreed to them gayly at last, as a sort of reparation which I might make my conscience, if I liked, for tearing her from a country which she had willingly lived out of for the far greater part of the last five years.
But when we met again I could see that she had been thinking seriously.
“I won't give the house absolutely away,” she said. “I will keep the deed of it myself, but I will establish that sort of school of Altrurian doctrine in it, and I will endow it, and when we come back here, for our experimental sojourn, after we've been in Altruria a year, we'll take up our quarters in it--I won't give the whole house to the school--and we will lecture on the later phases of Altrurian life to the pupils. How will that do?”
She put her arms around my neck, and I said that it would do admirably; but I had a certain sinking of the heart, for I saw how hard it was even for Eveleth to part with her property.
“I'll endow it,” she went on, “and I'll leave the rest of my money at interest here; unless you think that some Altrurian securities--”
“That was what I thought,” she returned; “and as it will cost us nothing while we are in Altruria, the interest will be something very handsome by the time we get back, even in United States bonds.”