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.

"No use lying to myself!" she soliloquized. "I think of him!.. I can't
help it... I ran out here, wild, restless, unable to reason... just
because I'd decided to see him again--to make sure I--I really didn't
care.... How furious--how ridiculous I'll feel--when--when--"

Lenore did not complete her thought, because she was not sure. Nothing
could be any truer than the fact that she had no idea how she would
feel. She began sensitively to distrust herself.