here. That question I have had out with my conscience.... Kurt,
don't think me a silly, sentimental girl. Events of late have made me a
woman."

He buried his face in his hands. "That's the most amazing of
all--you--Lenore Anderson, my American girl--asking me not to go to
war."

"But, dear, it is not so amazing. It's reasonable. Your peculiar point
of view makes it look different. I am no weak, timid, love-sick girl
afraid to let you go!... I've given you good, honorable, patriotic
reasons for your exemption from draft. Can you see that?"

"Yes. I grant all your claims. I know wheat well enough to tell you that
if vastly more wheat-raising is not done the world will starve. That
would hold good for the United States in forty years without war."

"Then if you see my point why are you opposed to it?" she asked.

"Because I am Kurt Dorn," he replied, bitterly.

His tone, his gloom made her shiver. It would take all her intelligence
and wit and reason to understand him, and vastly more than that to
change him. She thought earnestly. This was to be an ordeal profoundly
more difficult than the confession of her love. It was indeed a crisis
dwarfing the other she had met. She sensed in him a remarkably strange
attitude toward this war, compared with that of her brother or other
boys she knew who had gone.

"Because you are Kurt Dorn," she said, thoughtfully. "It's in the name,
then.... But I think it a pretty name--a good name. Have I not consented
to accept it as mine--for life?"

He could not answer that. Blindly he reached out with a shaking hand, to
find hers, to hold it close. Lenore felt the tumult in him. She was
shocked. A great tenderness, sweet and motherly, flooded over her.

"Dearest, in this dark hour--that was so bright a little while ago--you
must not keep anything from me," she replied. "I will be true to you. I
will crush my selfish hopes. I will be your mother.... tell me why you
must go to war because you are Kurt Dorn."

"My father was German. He hated this country--yours and mine. He plotted
with the I.W.W. He hated your father and wanted to destroy him....
Before he died he realized his crime. For so I take the few words he
spoke to Jerry. But all the same he was a traitor to my country. I bear
his name. I have German in me.... And by God I'm going to pay!"

His deep, passionate tones struck into Lenore's heart. She fought with a
rising terror. She was beginning to understand him. How helples