“For me?  Why, how absurd—­impossible!...  I—­I only remembered him—­a big handsome boy with blazing eyes....  And now I’m sorry for him!”

To whisper her amaze and doubt and consternation only augmented the instinctive recurring emotion.  She felt something she could not explain.  And that something was scarcely owing to this young man’s pitiful position between duty to his father and love for his country.  It had to do with his blazing eyes; intangible, dreamlike perceptions of him as not real, of vague sweet fancies that retreated before her introspective questioning.  What alarmed Lenore was a tendency of her mind to shirk this revealing analysis.  Never before had she been afraid to look into herself.  But now she was finding unplumbed wells of feeling, secret chambers of dreams into which she had never let the light, strange instinctive activities, more physical than mental.  When in her life before had she experienced a nameless palpitation of her heart?

Long she sat there, staring out into the night.  And the change in the aspect of the broad spaces, now dark and impenetrable and mysterious, seemed like the change in the knowledge of herself.  Once she had flattered herself that she was an inch of crystal water; now she seemed a complex, aloof, and contrary creature, almost on the verge of tumultuous emotions.

She said her prayers that night, a girlish habit resumed since her brother had declared his intention of enlisting in the army.  And to that old prayer, which her mother had prayed before her, she added an appeal of her own.  Strange that young Dorn’s face should flash out of gloom!  It was there, and her brother’s was fading.

“I wonder—­will he and Jim—­meet over there—­on the battle-field!” she whispered.  She hoped they would.  Like tigers those boys would fight the Germans.  Her heart beat high.  Then a cold wind seemed to blow over her.  It had a sickening weight.  If that icy and somber wind could have been traced to its source, then the mystery of life would have been clear.  But that source was the cause of war, as its effect was the horror of women.  A hideous and monstrous thing existed out there in the darkness.  Lenore passionately loved her brother, and this black thing had taken him away.  Why could not women, who suffered most, have some word in the regulation of events?  If women could help govern the world there would be no wars.

At last encroaching drowsiness dulled the poignancy of her feelings and she sank to sleep.

CHAPTER VI

Singing of birds at her window awakened Lenore.  The dawn streamed in bright and sweetly fragrant.  The wheat-fields seemed a rosy gold, and all that open slope called to her thrillingly of the beauty of the world and the happiness of youth.  It was not possible to be morbid at dawn.  “I hear!  I hear!” she whispered.  “From a thousand slopes far and wide!”