“It’s not that I can’t give him up,” she whispered, as if impelled to speak.  “I can.  I have given him up.  It’s this torture of suspense.  Oh, not to know!...  But if that newspaper had claimed him one of the killed, I’d not believe.”

So Lenore trusted more to the mystic whisper of her woman’s soul than to all the unproven outward things.  Still trust as she might, the voice of the world dinned in her ears, and between the two she was on the rack.  Loss of Jim—­loss of her mother—­what unfilled gulfs in her heart!  She was one who loved only few, but these deeply.  To-day when they were gone was different from yesterday when they were here—­different because memory recalled actual words, deeds, kisses of loved ones whose life was ended.  Utterly futile was it for Lenore to try to think of Dorn in that way.  She saw his stalwart form down through the summer haze, coming with his springy stride through the wheat.  Yet—­the words—­mortally wounded!  They had burned into her thought so that when she closed her eyes she saw them, darkly red, against the blindness of sight.  Pain was a sluggish stream with source high in her breast, and it moved with her unquickened blood.  If Dorn were really dead, what would become of her?  Selfish question for a girl whose lover had died for his country!  She would work, she would be worthy of him, she would never pine, she would live to remember.  But, ah! the difference to her!  Never for her who had so loved the open, the silken rustle of the wheat and the waving shadows, the green-and-gold slopes, the birds of the air and the beasts of the field, the voice of child and the sweetness of life—­never again would these be the same to her, if Dorn were gone forever.

That ache in her heart had communicated itself to all her being.  It filled her mind and her body.  Tears stung her eyes, and again they were dry when tears would have soothed.  Just as any other girl she wept, and then she burned with fever.  A longing she had only faintly known, a physical thing which she had resisted, had become real, insistent, beating.  Through love and loss she was to be denied a heritage common to all women.  A weariness dragged at her.  Noble spirit was not a natural thing.  It must be intelligence seeing the higher.  But to be human was to love life, to hate death, to faint under loss, to throb and pant with heavy sighs, to lie sleepless in the long dark night, to shrink with unutterable sadness at the wan light of dawn, to follow duty with a laggard sense, to feel the slow ebb of vitality and not to care, to suffer with a breaking heart.

* * * * *

Sunset hour reminded Lenore that she must not linger there on the slope.  So, following the grass-grown lane between the sections of wheat, she wended a reluctant way homeward.  Twilight was falling when she reached the yard.  The cooling air was full of a fragrance of flowers freshly watered.  Kathleen appeared on the path, evidently waiting for her.  The girl was growing tall.  Lenore remembered with a pang that her full mind had left little time for her to be a mother to this sister.  Kathleen came running, excited and wide-eyed.