Lenore liked the even, nodding rhythm of the plodding horses, and the way Bill threw a pebble from a sack on his seat, to hit this or that horse not keeping in line or pulling his share.  Bill’s aim was unerring.  He never hit the wrong horse, which would have been the case had he used a whip.  The grain came out in so tiny a stream that Lenore wondered how a bag was ever filled.  But she saw presently that even a tiny stream, if running steadily, soon made bulk.  That was proof of the value of small things, even atoms.

No marvel was it that Bill and his helper were as grimy as stokers of a furnace.  Lenore began to choke with the fine dust and to feel her eyes smart and to see it settle on her hands and dress.  She then had appreciation of the nature of a ten-hour day for workmen cutting eighteen acres of barley.  How would they ever cut the two thousand acres of wheat?  No wonder many men were needed.  Lenore sympathized with the operators of that harvester-thresher, but she did not like the dirt.  If she had been a man, though, that labor, hard as it was, would have appealed to her.  Harvesting the grain was beautiful, whether in the old, slow method of threshing or with one of these modern man-saving machines.

She jumped off, and the big, ponderous thing, almost gifted with intelligence, it seemed to Lenore, rolled on with its whirring roar, drawing its cloud of dust, and leaving behind a litter of straw.

It developed then that Adams had walked along with the machine, and he now addressed her.

“Will you be staying here till your father comes?” he asked.

“No, Mr. Adams.  Why do you ask?”

“You oughtn’t come out here alone or go back alone....  All these strange men!  Some of them hard customers!  You’ll excuse me, miss, but this harvest is not like other harvests.”

“I’ll wait for my father and I’ll not go out of sight,” replied Lenore.  Thanking the foreman for his thoughtfulness, she walked away, and soon she stood at the edge of the first wheat-field.

The grain was not yet ripe but near at hand it was a pale gold.  The wind, out of the west, waved and swept the wheat, while the almost imperceptible shadows followed.

A road half overgrown with grass and goldenrod bordered the wheat-field, and it wound away down toward the house.  Her father appeared mounted on the white horse he always rode.  Lenore sat down in the grass to wait for him.  Nodding stalks of goldenrod leaned to her face.  When looked at closely, how truly gold their color!  Yet it was not such a gold as that of the rich blaze of ripe wheat.  She was admitting to her consciousness a jealousy of anything comparable to wheat.  And suddenly she confessed that her natural love for it had been augmented by a subtle growing sentiment.  Not sentiment about the war or the need of the Allies or meaning of the staff of life.  She had sensed young Dorn’s passion for wheat and it had made a difference to her.