awn,
so much weight, to a concerted movement of men, but his mind was apart
from a harmony with that. Lenore felt that whatever had been the
sacrifice made by Kurt Dorn, it had been passed with his decision to go
to war. What she prayed for then was something of his spirit.

Slowly, in the gathering darkness, she descended the long slope. The
approaching night seemed sad, with autumn song of insects. All about her
breathed faith, from the black hills above, the gray slopes below, from
the shadowy void, from the murmuring of insect life in the grass. The
rugged fallow ground under her feet seemed to her to be a symbol of
faith--faith that winter would come and pass--the spring sun and rain
would burst the seeds of wheat--and another summer would see the golden
fields of waving grain. If she did not live to see them, they would be
there just the same; and so life and nature had faith in its promise.
That strange whisper was to Lenore the whisper of God.

CHAPTER XXVI

Through the pale obscurity of a French night, cool, raw, moist, with a
hint of spring in its freshness, a line of soldiers plodded along the
lonely, melancholy lanes. Wan starlight showed in the rifts between the
clouds. Neither dark nor light, the midnight hour had its unreality in
this line of marching men; and its reality in the dim, vague hedges, its
spectral posts, its barren fields.

Rain had ceased to fall, but a fine, cold, penetrating mist filled the
air. The ground was muddy in places, slippery in others; and here and
there it held pools of water ankle-deep. The stride of the marching men
appeared short and dragging, without swing or rhythm. It was weary, yet
full of the latent power of youth, of unused vitality. Stern, clean-cut,
youthful faces were set northward, unchanging in the shadowy, pale
gleams of the night. These faces lifted intensely whenever a strange,
muffled, deep-toned roar rolled out of the murky north. The night looked
stormy, but that rumble was not thunder. Fifty miles northward, beyond
that black and mysterious horizon, great guns were booming war.

Sometimes, as the breeze failed, the night was silent except for the
slow, sloppy tramp of the marching soldiers. Then the low voices were
hushed. When the wind freshened again it brought at intervals those
deep, significant detonations which, as the hours passed, seemed to grow
heavier and more thunderous.

At length a faint gray light appeared along the eastern sky, an