He needed to teach himself all this, with strong and repeated force, so that when he went to give Lenore Anderson the opportunity to express her gratitude, to see her sweet face again, and to meet the strange, warm glance of her blue eyes, so mysterious and somehow mocking, he could be a man of restraint, of pride, like any American, like any other college man she knew.  This was no time for a man to leave a girl bearing a burden of his unsolicited love, haunted, perhaps, by a generous reproach that she might have been a little to blame.  He had told her the truth, and so far he had been dignified.  Now let him bid her good-by, leaving no sorrow for her, and, once out of her impelling presence, let come what might come.  He could love her then; he could dare what he had never dared; he could surrender himself to the furious, insistent sweetness of a passion that was sheer bliss in its expression.  He could imagine kisses on the red lips that were not for him.

A husky shout from somewhere in the rear of the house diverted Kurt’s attention.  He listened.  It came again.  His name!  It seemed a strange call from out of the troubled past that had just ended.  He hurried through the house to the kitchen.  The woman stood holding a lamp, staring at Jerry.

Jerry appeared to have sunk against the wall.  His face was pallid, with drops of sweat standing out, with distorted, quivering lower jaw.  He could not look at Kurt.  He could not speak.  With shaking hand he pointed toward the back of the house.

Filled with nameless dread, Kurt rushed out.  He saw nothing unusual, heard nothing.  Rapidly he walked out through the yard, and suddenly he saw a glow in the sky above the barns.  Then he ran, so that he could get an unobstructed view of the valley.

The instant he obtained this he halted as if turned to stone.  The valley was a place of yellow light.  He stared.  With the wheat-fields all burned, what was the meaning of such a big light?  That broad flare had a center, low down on the valley floor.  As he gazed a monstrous flame leaped up, lighting colossal pillars of smoke that swirled upward, and showing plainer than in day the big warehouse and lines of freight-cars at the railroad station, eight miles distant.

“My God!” gasped Kurt.  “The warehouse—­my wheat—­on fire!”

Clear and unmistakable was the horrible truth.  Kurt heard the roar of the sinister flames.  Transfixed, he stood there, at first hardly able to see and to comprehend.  For miles the valley was as light as at noonday.  An awful beauty attended the scene.  How lurid and sinister the red heart of that fire?  How weird and hellish and impressive of destruction those black, mountain-high clouds of smoke!  He saw the freight-cars disappear under this fierce blazing and smoking pall.  He watched for what seemed endless moments.  He saw the changes of that fire, swift and terrible.  And only then did Kurt Dorn awaken to the full sense of the calamity.