Ned Currie was puzzled by the determination and abandon of his sweetheart and was also deeply touched.  He had wanted the girl to become his mistress but changed his mind.  He wanted to protect and care for her.  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said sharply; “you may be sure I’ll let you do no such thing.  As soon as I get a good job I’ll come back.  For the present you’ll have to stay here.  It’s the only thing we can do.”

On the evening before he left Winesburg to take up his new life in the city, Ned Currie went to call on Alice.  They walked about through the streets for an hour and then got a rig from Wesley Moyer’s livery and went for a drive in the country.  The moon came up and they found themselves unable to talk.  In his sadness the young man forgot the resolutions he had made regarding his conduct with the girl.

They got out of the buggy at a place where a long meadow ran down to the bank of Wine Creek and there in the dim light became lovers.  When at midnight they returned to town they were both glad.  It did not seem to them that anything that could happen in the future could blot out the wonder and beauty of the thing that had happened.  “Now we will have to stick to each other, whatever happens we will have to do that,” Ned Currie said as he left the girl at her father’s door.

The young newspaper man did not succeed in getting a place on a Cleveland paper and went west to Chicago.  For a time he was lonely and wrote to Alice almost every day.  Then he was caught up by the life of the city; he began to make friends and found new interests in life.  In Chicago he boarded at a house where there were several women.  One of them attracted his attention and he forgot Alice in Winesburg.  At the end of a year he had stopped writing letters, and only once in a long time, when he was lonely or when he went into one of the city parks and saw the moon shining on the grass as it had shone that night on the meadow by Wine Creek, did he think of her at all.

In Winesburg the girl who had been loved grew to be a woman.  When she was twenty-two years old her father, who owned a harness repair shop, died suddenly.  The harness maker was an old soldier, and after a few months his wife received a widow’s pension.  She used the first money she got to buy a loom and became a weaver of carpets, and Alice got a place in Winney’s store.  For a number of years nothing could have induced her to believe that Ned Currie would not in the end return to her.

She was glad to be employed because the daily round of toil in the store made the time of waiting seem less long and uninteresting.  She began to save money, thinking that when she had saved two or three hundred dollars she would follow her lover to the city and try if her presence would not win back his affections.