A nervous, sighing breeze had come with the full coming
of the moon, and underneath him he heard the troubled rustle of leaves
in the obscurity, the sifting and drifting of tired, loose things, the
stir of the night which awakened a restless mood in his soul. He had
listened to her as she had proclaimed her love, and yet this love,
without illusions, sharply recalled to him other passions. He remembered
his first love, a boy-and-girl affair, and sharply contrasting it with a
sudden ache to this absence of impulse and illusions, of phrases, vows,
without logic, thrown out in the sweet madness of the moment. Why had
she not cried out something impulsive, promised things that could not
be. Then he realized, standing there in the harvest moonlight, in the
breaking up of summer, that he was no longer a youth, that certain
things could not be lived over, and that, as she had said, he too felt
that this was the great love, the last that he would share; that if it
ended, his youth ended and with his youth all that in him clung to life.
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