nine Germans before they retreated. Nine! Owens seen him do it, like a mad bull loose.  Then the shell came over that put Dorn out, an’ Owens, too.

“Well, Dorn had a mangled arm, an’ many wounds.  They amputated his arm in France, patched him up, an’ sent him back to New York with a lot of other wounded soldiers.  They expected him to die long ago.  But he hangs on.  He’s full of lead now.  What a hell of a lot of killin’ some men take!...  My boy Jim would have been like that!

“So there, boys, you have a little bit of American fightin’ come home to you, straight an’ true.  I say that’s what the Germans have roused.  Well, it was a bad day for them when they figgered everythin’ on paper, had it all cut an’ dried, but failed to see the spirit of men!”

Lenore tore herself away from the window so that she could not hear any more, and in the darkness of her room she began to pace to and fro, beginning to undress for bed, shaking in some kind of a frenzy, scarcely knowing what she was about, until sundry knocks from furniture and the falling over a chair awakened her to the fact that she was in a tumult.

“What—­am I—­doing!” she panted, in bewilderment, reaching out in the dark to turn on the light.

Like awakening from a nightmare, she saw the bright light flash up.  It changed her feeling.  Who was this person whose image stood reflected in the mirror?  Lenore’s recognition of herself almost stunned her.  What had happened?  She saw that her hair fell wildly over her bare shoulders; her face shone white, with red spots in her cheeks; her eyes seemed balls of fire; her lips had a passionate, savage curl; her breast, bare and heaving, showed a throbbing, tumultuous heart.  And as she realized how she looked, it struck her that she felt an inexplicable passion.  She felt intense as steel, hot as fire, quivering with the pulsation of rapid blood, a victim to irrepressible thrills that rushed over her from the very soles of her feet to the roots of her hair.  Something glorious, terrible, and furious possessed her.  When she understood what it was she turned out the light and fell upon the bed, where, as the storm slowly subsided, she thought and wondered and sorrowed, and whispered to herself.

The tale of Dorn’s tragedy had stirred to the depths the primitive, hidden, and unplumbed in the unknown nature of her.  Just now she had looked at herself, at her two selves—­the white-skinned and fair-haired girl that civilization had produced—­and the blazing, panting, savage woman of the bygone ages.  She could not escape from either.  The story of Demon Dorn’s terrible fight had retrograded her, for the moment, to the female of the species, more savage and dangerous than the male.  No use to lie!  She had gloried in his prowess.  He was her man, gone out with club, to beat down the brutes that would steal her from him.

“Alas!  What are we?  What am I?” she whispered.  “Do I know myself?  What could I not have done a moment ago?”