“Then if you see my point why are you opposed to it?” she asked.

“Because I am Kurt Dorn,” he replied, bitterly.

His tone, his gloom made her shiver.  It would take all her intelligence and wit and reason to understand him, and vastly more than that to change him.  She thought earnestly.  This was to be an ordeal profoundly more difficult than the confession of her love.  It was indeed a crisis dwarfing the other she had met.  She sensed in him a remarkably strange attitude toward this war, compared with that of her brother or other boys she knew who had gone.

“Because you are Kurt Dorn,” she said, thoughtfully.  “It’s in the name, then....  But I think it a pretty name—­a good name.  Have I not consented to accept it as mine—­for life?”

He could not answer that.  Blindly he reached out with a shaking hand, to find hers, to hold it close.  Lenore felt the tumult in him.  She was shocked.  A great tenderness, sweet and motherly, flooded over her.

“Dearest, in this dark hour—­that was so bright a little while ago—­you must not keep anything from me,” she replied.  “I will be true to you.  I will crush my selfish hopes.  I will be your mother.... tell me why you must go to war because you are Kurt Dorn.”

“My father was German.  He hated this country—­yours and mine.  He plotted with the I.W.W.  He hated your father and wanted to destroy him....  Before he died he realized his crime.  For so I take the few words he spoke to Jerry.  But all the same he was a traitor to my country.  I bear his name.  I have German in me....  And by God I’m going to pay!”

His deep, passionate tones struck into Lenore’s heart.  She fought with a rising terror.  She was beginning to understand him.  How helpless she felt—­how she prayed for inspiration—­for wisdom!

“Pay!...  How?” she asked.

“In the only way possible.  I’ll see that a Dorn goes to war—­who will show his American blood—­who will fight and kill—­and be killed!”

His passion, then, was more than patriotism.  It had its springs in the very core of his being.  He had, it seemed, a debt that he must pay.  But there was more than this in his grim determination.  And Lenore divined that it lay hidden in his bitter reference to his German blood.  He hated that—­doubted himself because of it.  She realized now that to keep him from going to war would be to make him doubt his manhood and eventually to despise himself.  No longer could she think of persuading him to stay home.  She must forget herself.  She knew then that she had the power to keep him and she could use it, but she must not do so.  This tragic thing was a matter of his soul.  But if he went to war with this bitter obsession, with this wrong motive, this passionate desire to spill blood in him that he hated, he would lose his soul.  He must be changed.  All her love, all her woman’s flashing, subtle thought concentrated on this fact.  How strange the choice that had been given her!  Not only must she relinquish her hope of keeping him home, but she must perhaps go to desperate ends to send him away with a changed spirit.  The moment of decision was agony for her.