anything but think!” That doctor is a good chap, but he doesn’t figure Kurt Dorn if he imagines the Germans can kill me by making me think.

We’re nearing France now, and the very air is charged.  An aeroplane came out to meet us—­welcome us, I guess, and it flew low.  The soldiers went wild.  I never had such a thrill.  That air game would just suit me, if I were fitted for it.  But I’m no mechanic.  Besides, I’m too big and heavy.  My place will be in the front line with a bayonet.  Strange how a bayonet fascinates me!

They say we can’t write home anything about the war.  I’ll write you something, whenever I can.  Don’t be unhappy if you do not hear often—­or if my letters cease to come.  My heart and my mind are full of you.  Whatever comes to me—­the training over here—­the going to the trenches—­the fighting—­I shall be safe if only I can remember you.

    With love,

    Kurt.

Lenore carried that letter in her bosom when she went out to walk in the fields, to go over the old ground she and Kurt had trod hand in hand.  From the stone seat above the brook she watched the sunset.  All was still except the murmur of the running water, and somehow she could not long bear that.  As the light began to shade on the slopes, she faced them, feeling, as always, a strength come to her from their familiar lines.  Twilight found her high above the ranch, and absolutely alone.  She would have this lonely hour, and then, all her mind and energy must go to what she knew was imperative duty.  She would work to the limit of her endurance.

It was an autumn twilight, with a cool wind, gray sky, and sad, barren slopes.  The fertile valley seemed half obscured in melancholy haze, and over toward the dim hills beyond night had already fallen.  No stars, no moon, no afterglow of sunset illumined the grayness that in this hour seemed prophetic of Lenore’s future.

“‘Safe!’ he said.  ‘I shall be safe if only I can remember you,’” she whispered to herself, wonderingly.  “What did he mean?”

Pondering the thought, she divined it had to do with Dorn’s singular spiritual mood.  He had gone to lend his body as so much physical brawn, so much weight, to a concerted movement of men, but his mind was apart from a harmony with that.  Lenore felt that whatever had been the sacrifice made by Kurt Dorn, it had been passed with his decision to go to war.  What she prayed for then was something of his spirit.

Slowly, in the gathering darkness, she descended the long slope.  The approaching night seemed sad, with autumn song of insects.  All about her breathed faith, from the black hills above, the gray slopes below, from the shadowy void, from the murmuring of insect life in the grass.  The rugged fallow ground under her feet seemed to her to be a symbol of faith—­faith that winter would come and pass—­the spring sun and rain would burst the seeds of wheat—­and another summer would see the golden fields of waving grain.  If she did not live to see them, they would be there just the same; and so life and nature had faith in its promise.  That strange whisper was to Lenore the whisper of God.