The afternoon came when Anderson brought a minister.  Then a few moments sufficed to make Lenore Dorn’s wife.

CHAPTER XXXI

The remarkable happened.  Scarcely had the minister left when Kurt Dorn’s smiling wonder and happiness sustained a break, as sharp and cold and terrible as if nature had transformed him from man to beast.

His face became like that of a gorilla.  Struggling up, he swept his right arm over and outward with singular twisting energy.  A bayonet-thrust!  And for him his left arm was still intact!  A savage, unintelligible battle-cry, yet unmistakably German, escaped his lips.

Lenore stood one instant petrified.  Her father, grinding his teeth, attempted to lead her away.  But as Dorn was about to pitch off the bed, Lenore, with piercing cry, ran to catch him and force him back.  There she held him, subdued his struggles, and kept calling with that intensity of power and spirit which must have penetrated even his delirium.  Whatever influence she exerted, it quieted him, changed his savage face, until he relaxed and lay back passive and pale.  It was possible to tell exactly when his reason returned, for it showed in the gaze he fixed upon Lenore.

“I had—­one—­of my fits!” he said, huskily.

“Oh—­I don’t know what it was,” replied Lenore, with quavering voice.  Her strength began to leave her now.  Her arms that had held him so firmly began to slip away.

“Son, you had a bad spell,” interposed Anderson, with his heavy breathing.  “First one she’s seen.”

“Lenore, I laid out my Huns again,” said Dorn, with a tragic smile.  “Lately I could tell when—­they were coming back.”

“Did you know just now?” queried Lenore.

“I think so.  I wasn’t really out of my head.  I’ve known when I did that.  It’s a strange feeling—­thought—­memory ... and action drives it away.  Then I seem always to want to—­kill my Huns all over again.”

Lenore gazed at him with mournful and passionate tenderness.  “Do you remember that we were just married?” she asked.

“My wife!” he whispered.

“Husband!...  I knew you were coming home to me....  I knew you would not die....  I know you will get well.”

“I begin to feel that, too.  Then—­maybe the black spells will go away.”

“They must or—­or you’ll lose me,” faltered Lenore.  “If you go on killing your Huns over and over—­it’ll be I who will die.”

She carried with her to her room a haunting sense of Dorn’s reception of her last speech.  Some tremendous impression it made on him, but whether of fear of domination or resolve, or all combined, she could not tell.  She had weakened in mention of the return of his phantoms.  But neither Dorn nor her father ever guessed that, once in her room, she collapsed from sheer feminine horror at the prospect of seeing Dorn change from a man to a gorilla, and to repeat the savage orgy of remurdering his Huns.  That was too much for Lenore.  She who had been invincible in faith, who could stand any tests of endurance and pain, was not proof against a spectacle of Dorn’s strange counterfeit presentment of the actual and terrible killing he had performed with a bayonet.