Then clearly floated to him a slow sweeping rustle of the wheat.  Breast-high it stood down there, outside his window, a moving body, higher than the gloom.  That rustle was a voice of childhood, youth, and manhood, whispering to him, thrilling as never before.  It was a growing rustle, different from that when the wheat had matured.  It seemed to change and grow in volume, in meaning.  The night wind bore it, but life—­bursting life was behind it, and behind that seemed to come a driving and a mighty spirit.  Beyond the growth of the wheat, beyond its life and perennial gift, was something measureless and obscure, infinite and universal.  Suddenly Dorn saw that something as the breath and the blood and the spirit of wheat—­and of man.  Dust and to dust returned they might be, but this physical form was only the fleeting inscrutable moment on earth, springing up, giving birth to seed, dying out for that ever-increasing purpose which ran through the ages.

A soft footfall sounded on the stairs.  Lenore came.  She leaned over him and the starlight fell upon her face, sweet, luminous, beautiful.  In the sense of her compelling presence, in the tender touch of her hands, in the whisper of woman’s love, Dorn felt uplifted high above the dark pale of the present with its war and pain and clouded mind to wheat—­to the fertile fields of a golden age to come.