He entered and sat down on the bed.  It was small, with the slope of the roof running down so low that he had learned to stoop when close to the wall.  There was no ceiling.  Bare yellow rafters and dark old shingles showed.  He could see light through more than one little hole.  The window was small, low, and without glass.  How many times he had sat there, leaning out in the hot dusk of summer nights, dreaming dreams that were never to come true.  Alas for the hopes and illusions of boyhood!  So long as he could remember, this room was most closely associated with his actions and his thoughts.  It was a part of him.  He almost took it into his confidence as if it were human.  Never had he become what he had dared to dream he would, yet, somehow, at that moment he was not ashamed.  It struck him then what few belongings he really had.  But he had been taught to get along with little.

Living in that room was over for him.  He was filled with unutterable sadness.  Yet he would not have had it any different.  Bigger, and selfless things called to him.  He was bidding farewell to his youth and all that it related to.  A solemn procession of beautiful memories passed through his mind, born of the nights there in that room of his boyhood, with the wind at the eaves and the rain pattering on the shingles.  What strong and vivid pictures!  No grief, no pain, no war could rob him of this best heritage from the past.

He got up to go.  And then a blinding rush of tears burned his eyes.  This room seemed dearer than all the rest of his home.  It was hard to leave.  His last look was magnified, transformed.  “Good-by!” he whispered, with a swelling constriction in his throat.  At the head of the dark old stairway he paused a moment, and then with bowed head he slowly descended.

CHAPTER XVII

An August twilight settled softly down over “Many Waters” while Lenore Anderson dreamily gazed from her window out over the darkening fields so tranquil now after the day’s harvest toil.

Of late, in thoughtful hours such as this, she had become conscious of strain, of longing.  She had fought out a battle with herself, had confessed her love for Kurt Dorn, and, surrendering to the enchantment of that truth, had felt her love grow with every thought of him and every beat of a thrilling pulse.  In spite of a longing that amounted to pain and a nameless dread she could not deny, she was happy.  And she waited, with a woman’s presaging sense of events, for a crisis that was coming.

Presently she heard her father down-stairs, his heavy tread and hearty voice.  These strenuous harvest days left him little time for his family.  And Lenore, having lost herself in her dreams, had not, of late, sought him out in the fields.  She was waiting, and, besides, his keen eyes, at once so penetrating and so kind, had confused her.  Few secrets had she ever kept from her father.