d them. And then she whispered what her
intelligence told her was an unalterable fact--Kurt Dorn could never be
changed. But her sympathy and love and passion, all that was womanly
emotion, stormed at her intelligence and refused to listen to it.

Nothing short of a great shock would divert Dorn from his tragic
headlong rush toward the fate he believed unalterable. Lenore sensed a
terrible, sinister earnestness in him. She could not divine its meaning.
But it was such a driving passion that no man possessing it and free to
the violence of war could ever escape death. Even if by superhuman
strife, and the guidance of Providence, he did escape death, he would
have lost something as precious as life. If Dorn went to war at all--if
he ever reached those blood-red trenches, in the thick of fire and
shriek and ferocity--there to express in horrible earnestness what she
vaguely felt yet could not define--then so far as she was concerned she
imagined that she would not want him to come back.

That was the strength of spirit that breathed out of the night and the
silence to her. Dorn would go to war as no ordinary soldier, to obey, to
fight, to do his duty; but for some strange, unfathomable obsession of
his own. And, therefore, if he went at all he was lost. War, in its
inexplicable horror, killed the souls of endless hordes of men.
Therefore, if he went at all she, too, was lost to the happiness that
might have been hers. She would never love another man. She could never
marry. She would never have a child.

So his soul and her happiness were in the balance weighed against a
woman's power. It seemed to Lenore that she felt hopelessly unable to
carry the issue to victory; and yet, on the other hand, a tumultuous and
wonderful sweetness of sensation called to her, insidiously, of the
infallible potency of love. What could she do to save Dorn's life and
his soul? There was only one answer to that. She would do anything. She
must make him love her to the extent that he would have no will to carry
out this desperate intent. There was little time to do that. The gradual
growth of affection through intimacy and understanding was not possible
here. It must come as a flash of lightning. She must bewilder him with
the revelation of her love, and then by all its incalculable power hold
him there.

It was her father's wish; it would be the salvation of Dorn; it meant
all to her. But if to keep him there would make him a slacker, Lenore