“Now that you’ve been here, do you like it better than your barren hills?” asked Lenore.

Kurt hesitated.  “I don’t know,” he answered, slowly.  “But maybe that desert I’ve lived in accounts for much I lack.”

“Would you like to stay at ’Many Waters’—­if you weren’t going to war?”

“I might prefer ‘Many Waters’ to any place on earth.  It’s a paradise.  But I would not chose to stay here.”

“Why?  When you return—­you know—­my father will need you here.  And if anything should happen to him I will have to run the ranch.  Then I would need you.”

Dorn stopped in his tracks and gazed at her as if there were slight misgivings in his mind.

“Lenore, if you owned this ranch would you want me—­me for your manager?” he asked, bluntly.

“Yes,” she replied.

“You would?  Knowing I was in love with you?”

“Well, I had forgotten that,” she replied, with a little laugh.  “It would be rather embarrassing—­and funny, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes, it would,” he said, grimly, and walked on again.  He made a gesture of keen discomfiture.  “I knew you hadn’t taken me seriously.”

“I believed you, but I could not take you very seriously,” she murmured.

“Why not?” he demanded, as if stung, and his eyes flashed on her.

“Because your declaration was not accompanied by the usual—­question—­that a girl naturally expects under such circumstances.”

“Good Heaven!  You say that?...  Lenore Anderson, you think me insincere because I did not ask you to marry me,” he asserted, with bitter pathos.

“No.  I merely said you were not—­very serious,” she replied.  It was fascination to torment him this way, yet it hurt her, too.  She was playing on the verge of a precipice, not afraid of a misstep, but glorying in the prospect of a leap into the abyss.  Something deep and strange in her bade her make him show her how much he loved her.  If she drove him to desperation she would reward him.

“I am going to war,” he began, passionately, “to fight for you and your sisters....  I am ruined....  The only noble and holy feeling left to me—­that I can have with me in the dark hours—­is my love for you.  If you do not believe that, I am indeed the most miserable of beggars!  Most boys going to the front leave many behind whom they love.  I have no one but you.... don’t make me a coward.”

“I believe you.  Forgive me,” she said.

“If I had asked you to marry me—­me—­why, I’d have been a selfish, egotistical fool.  You are far above me.  And I want you to know I know it....  But even if I had not—­had the blood I have—­even if I had been prosperous instead of ruined, I’d never have asked you, unless I came back whole from the war.”

They had been walking out the lane during this conversation and had come close to the wheat-field.  The day was hot, but pleasant, the dry wind being laden with harvest odors.  The hum of the machines was like the roar in a flour-mill.