A subtle indefinable change, perceptible to Dorn, even in his confused state, came over the girl.

“I did not say you were impertinent,” she returned.  “I remembered seeing you—­notice me, that is all.”

Self-possessed, aloof, and kind, Miss Anderson now became an impenetrable mystery to Dorn.  But that only accentuated the distance she had intimated lay between them.  Her kindness stung him to recover his composure.  He wished she had not been kind.  What a singular chance that had brought her here to his home—­the daughter of a man who came to demand a long-unpaid debt!  What a dispelling of the vague thing that had been only a dream!  Dorn gazed away across the yellowing hills to the dim blue of the mountains where rolled the Oregon.  Despite the color, it was gray—­like his future.

“I heard you tell father you had studied wheat,” said the girl, presently, evidently trying to make conversation.

“Yes, all my life,” replied Kurt.  “My study has mostly been under my father.  Look at my hands.”  He held out big, strong hands, scarred and knotted, with horny palms uppermost, and he laughed.  “I can be proud of them, Miss Anderson....  But I had a splendid year in California at the university and I graduated from the Washington State Agricultural College.”

“You love wheat—­the raising of it, I mean?” she inquired.

“It must be that I do, though I never had such a thought.  Wheat is so wonderful.  No one can guess who does not know it!...  The clean, plump grain, the sowing on fallow ground, the long wait, the first tender green, and the change day by day to the deep waving fields of gold—­then the harvest, hot, noisy, smoky, full of dust and chaff, and the great combine-harvesters with thirty-four horses.  Oh!  I guess I do love it all....  I worked in a Spokane flour-mill, too, just to learn how flour is made.  There is nothing in the world so white, so clean, so pure as flour made from the wheat of these hills!”

“Next you’ll be telling me that you can bake bread,” she rejoined, and her laugh was low and sweet.  Her eyes shone with soft blue gleams.

“Indeed I can!  I bake all the bread we use,” he said, stoutly.  “And I flatter myself I can beat any girl you know.”

“You can beat mine, I’m sure.  Before I went to college I did pretty well.  But I learned too much there.  Now my mother and sisters, and brother Jim, all the family except dad, make fun of my bread.”

“You have a brother?  How old is he?”

“One brother—­Jim, we call him.  He—­he is just past twenty-one.”  She faltered the last few words.

Kurt felt on common ground with her then.  The sudden break in her voice, the change in her face, the shadowing of the blue eyes—­these were eloquent.

“Oh, it’s horrible—­this need of war!” she exclaimed.

“Yes,” he replied, simply.  “But maybe your brother will not be called.”

“Called!  Why, he refused to wait for the draft!  He went and enlisted.  Dad patted him on the back....  If anything happens to him it’ll kill my mother.  Jim is her idol.  It’d break my heart....  Oh, I hate the very name of Germans!”