Page:Caroline Lockhart--The full of the Moon.djvu/118

 at the far end of the dobe came to remind them that the evening had passed.

"You will come again soon?" Nan whispered softly.

"Soon," he replied.

Nan sat with her chin in her palm watching horse and rider disappear in the moonlight. The glamour of the hour and his ardent, if awkward, love-making was still upon her, but with his going there began the persistent, disquieting voice of conscience inquiring: "Where are you drifting? When is this to end, and how? Are you in earnest, and if you are not, are you fair to Ben?"

Nan had long since come to see that she and Ben were far apart in their instincts and their standards. They seldom held the same opinions of people or things, because his reasoning was faulty and his logic askew; but she excused and palliated as she did his frequent slips in English, his omission of the small courtesies, his amazing ignorance of any world but his own.

It was a significant fact that as Nan became less and less conscious of his deficiencies, more tolerant of his shortcomings, she