And in these long hours of his vigil Kurt Dorn divined a relation between his love for Lenore Anderson and a terrible need that had grown upon him.  A need of his heart and his soul!  More than he needed her, if even in his wildest dreams he had permitted himself visions of an earthly paradise, he needed to prove to his blood and his spirit that he was actually and truly American.  He had no doubt of his intelligence, his reason, his choice.  The secret lay hidden in the depths of him, and he knew it came from the springs of the mother who had begotten him.  His mother had given him birth, and by every tie he was mostly hers.

Kurt had been in college during the first year of the world war.  And his name, his fair hair and complexion, his fluency in German, and his remarkable efficiency in handicrafts had opened him to many a hint, many a veiled sarcasm that had stung him like a poison brand.  There was injustice in all this war spirit.  It changed the minds of men and women.  He had not doubted himself until those terrible scenes with his father, and, though he had reacted to them as an American, he had felt the drawing, burning blood tie.  He hated everything German and he knew he was wrong in doing so.  He had clear conception in his mind of the difference between the German war motives and means, and those of the other nations.

Kurt’s problem was to understand himself.  His great fight was with his own soul.  His material difficulties and his despairing love had suddenly been transformed, so that they had lent his spirit wings.  How many poor boys and girls in America must be helplessly divided between parents and country!  How many faithful and blind parents, obedient to the laws of mind and heart, set for all time, must see a favorite son go out to fight against all they had held sacred!

That was all bad enough, but Kurt had more to contend with.  No illusions had he of a chastened German spirit, a clarified German mind, an unbrutalized German heart.  Kurt knew his father.  What would change his father?  Nothing but death!  Death for himself or death for his only son!  Kurt had an incalculable call to prove forever to himself that he was free.  He had to spill his own blood to prove himself, or he had to spill that of an enemy.  And he preferred that it should be his own.  But that did not change a vivid and terrible picture which haunted him at times.  He saw a dark, wide, and barren shingle of the world, a desert of desolation made by man, where strange, windy shrieks and thundering booms and awful cries went up in the night, and where drifting palls of smoke made starless sky, and bursts of reddish fires made hell.

Suddenly Kurt’s slow pacing along the road was halted, as was the trend of his thought.  He was not sure he had heard a sound.  But he quivered all over.  The night was far advanced now; the wind was almost still; the wheat was smooth and dark as the bosom of a resting sea.  Kurt listened.  He imagined he heard, far away, the faint roar of an automobile.  But it might have been a train on the railroad.  Sometimes on still nights he caught sounds like that.