“Beautiful!” she replied, softly.  “Like the rainbow in the sky—­God’s promise of life!”

“An’, Kathie, what do you say?” went on Anderson.

“Some wheat-fields!” replied Kathleen, with an air of woman’s wisdom.  “Fetch on your young wheat-sowers, dad, and I’ll pick out a husband.”

“An’ you, son?” finished Anderson, as if wistfully, yet heartily playing his last card.  He was remembering Jim—­the wild but beloved son—­the dead soldier.  He was fearful for the crowning hope of his years.

“As ye sow—­so shall ye reap!” was Dorn’s reply, strong and thrilling.  And Lenore felt her father’s strange, heart-satisfying content.

* * * * *

Twilight crept down around the old home on the hill.

Dorn was alone, leaning at the window.  He had just strength to lean there, with uplifted head.  Lenore had left him alone, divining his wish.  As she left him there came a sudden familiar happening in his brain, like a snap-back, and the contending tide of gray forms—­the Huns—­rushed upon him.  He leaned there at the window, but just the same he awaited the shock on the ramparts of the trench.  A ferocious and terrible storm of brain, that used to have its reaction in outward violence, now worked inside him, like a hot wind that drove his blood.  During the spell he fought out his great fight—­again for the thousandth time he rekilled his foes.  That storm passed through him without an outward quiver.

His Huns—­charged again—­bayoneted again—­and he felt acute pain in the left arm that was gone.  He felt the closing of the hand which was not there.  His Huns lay in the shadow, stark and shapeless, with white faces upward—­a line of dead foes, remorseless and abhorrent to him, forever damned by his ruthless spirit.  He saw the boy slide off his bayonet, beyond recall, murdered by some evil of which Dorn had been the motion.  Then the prone, gray forms vanished in the black gulf of Dorn’s brain.

“Lenore will never know—­how my Huns come back to me,” he whispered.

Night with its trains of stars!  Softly the darkness unfolded down over the dim hills, lonely, tranquil, sweet.  A night-bird caroled.  The song of insects, very faint and low, came to him like a still, sad music of humanity, from over the hills, far away, in the strife-ridden world.  The world of men was there and life was incessant, monstrous, and inconceivable.  This old home of his—­the old house seemed full of well-remembered sounds of mouse and cricket and leaf against the roof and soft night wind at the eaves—­sounds that brought his boyhood back, his bare feet on the stairs, his father’s aloofness, his mother’s love.

* * * * *