“Good night, dad.  I’m going up,” she said.  “Will you look after Kurt?”

“Sure.  Come in, son,” replied her father.

Lenore felt Dorn’s strange, intent gaze upon her as she passed him.  Lightly she ran up-stairs and turned at the top.  The hall was bright and Dorn stood full in the light, his face upturned.  It still wore the softer expression of those last few moments.  Lenore waved her hand, and he smiled.  The moment was natural.  Youth to youth!  Lenore felt it.  She marveled that he did not.  A sweet devil of wilful coquetry possessed her.

“Oh, did you say you wouldn’t go?” she softly called.

“I said only good night,” he replied.

“If you don’t go, then you will never be General Dorn, will you?  What a pity!”

“I’ll go.  And then it will be—­’Private Dorn—­missing.  No relatives,’” he replied.

That froze Lenore.  Her heart quaked.  She gazed down upon him with all her soul in her eyes.  She knew it and did not care.  But he could not see.

“Good night, Kurt Dorn,” she called, and ran to her room.

Composure did not come to her until she was ready for bed, with the light out and in her old seat at the window.  Night and silence and starlight always lent Lenore strength.  She prayed to them now and to the spirit she knew dwelt beyond them.  And then she whispered what her intelligence told her was an unalterable fact—­Kurt Dorn could never be changed.  But her sympathy and love and passion, all that was womanly emotion, stormed at her intelligence and refused to listen to it.

Nothing short of a great shock would divert Dorn from his tragic headlong rush toward the fate he believed unalterable.  Lenore sensed a terrible, sinister earnestness in him.  She could not divine its meaning.  But it was such a driving passion that no man possessing it and free to the violence of war could ever escape death.  Even if by superhuman strife, and the guidance of Providence, he did escape death, he would have lost something as precious as life.  If Dorn went to war at all—­if he ever reached those blood-red trenches, in the thick of fire and shriek and ferocity—­there to express in horrible earnestness what she vaguely felt yet could not define—­then so far as she was concerned she imagined that she would not want him to come back.

That was the strength of spirit that breathed out of the night and the silence to her.  Dorn would go to war as no ordinary soldier, to obey, to fight, to do his duty; but for some strange, unfathomable obsession of his own.  And, therefore, if he went at all he was lost.  War, in its inexplicable horror, killed the souls of endless hordes of men.  Therefore, if he went at all she, too, was lost to the happiness that might have been hers.  She would never love another man.  She could never marry.  She would never have a child.