Dorn was looking at the girl as he spoke.  Her steady gaze had been on him ever since she entered the car, and in the shade of her hat and the veil she was adjusting her eyes seemed very dark and sweet and thoughtful.  She brightly nodded her thanks as she held the veil aside with both hands.

“I wish you luck.  Good-by,” she said, and closed the veil.

Still, Dorn could see her eyes through it, and now they were sweeter, more mysterious, more provocative of haunting thoughts.  It flashed over him with dread certainty that he had fallen in love with her.  The shock struck him mute.  He had no reply for the rancher’s hearty farewell.  Then the car lurched away and dust rose in a cloud.

CHAPTER III

With a strange knocking of his heart, high up toward his throat, Kurt Dorn stood stock-still, watching the moving cloud of dust until it disappeared over the hill.

No doubt entered his mind.  The truth, the fact, was a year old—­a long-familiar and dreamy state—­but its meaning had not been revealed to him until just a moment past.  Everything had changed when she looked out with that sweet, steady gaze through the parted veil and then slowly closed it.  She had changed.  There was something intangible about her that last moment, baffling, haunting.  He leaned against a crooked old gate-post that as a boy he had climbed, and the thought came to him that this spot would all his life be vivid and poignant in his memory.  The first sight of a blue-eyed, sunny-haired girl, a year and more before, had struck deep into his unconscious heart; a second sight had made her an unforgettable reality:  and a third had been the realization of love.

It was sad, regrettable, incomprehensible, and yet somehow his inner being swelled and throbbed.  Her name was Lenore Anderson.  Her father was one of the richest men in the state of Washington.  She had one brother, Jim, who would not wait for the army draft.  Kurt trembled and a hot rush of tears dimmed his eyes.  All at once his lot seemed unbearable.  An immeasurable barrier had arisen between him and his old father—­a hideous thing of blood, of years, of ineradicable difference; the broad acres of wheatland so dear to him were to be taken from him; love had overcome him with headlong rush, a love that could never be returned; and cruelest of all, there was the war calling him to give up his home, his father, his future, and to go out to kill and to be killed.

It came to him while he leaned there, that, remembering the light of Lenore Anderson’s eyes, he could not give up to bitterness and hatred, whatever his misfortunes and his fate.  She would never be anything to him, but he and her brother Jim and many other young Americans must be incalculable all to her.  That thought saved Kurt Dorn.  There were other things besides his own career, his happiness; and the way he was placed, however unfortunate from a selfish point of view, must not breed a morbid self-pity.