."

"Should we count the cost?" she asked.

Anderson had sworn. "No, we shouldn't. But I'm not goin' to lose my
girl. Do you get that hunch?... I've bought bonds by the bushel. I've
given thousands to your relief societies. I gave up my son Jim--an' that
cost us mother.... I'm raisin' a million bushels of wheat this year that
the government can have. An' I'm starvin' to death because I don't get
what I used to eat.... Then this last blow--Dorn!--that fine young
wheat-man, the best--Aw! Lenore..."

"But, dad, is--isn't there any--any hope?"

Anderson was silent.

"Dad," she had pleaded, "if he were really dead--buried--oh! wouldn't I
feel it?"

"You've overworked yourself. Now you've got to rest," her father had
replied, huskily.

"But, dad ..."

"I said no.... I've a heap of pride in what you've done. An' I sure
think you're the best Anderson of the lot. That's all. Now kiss me an'
go to bed."

That explained how Lenore came to be alone, high up' on the vast
wheat-slope, watching and feeling, with no more work to do. The slow
climb there had proved to her how much she needed rest. But work even
under strain or pain would have been preferable to endless hours to
think, to remember, to fight despair.

Mortally wounded! She whispered the tragic phrase. When? Where? How had
her lover been mortally wounded? That meant death. But no other word had
come and no spiritual realization of death abided in her soul. It seemed
impossible for Lenore to accept things as her father and friends did.
Nevertheless, equally impossible was it not to be influenced by their
practical minds. Because of her nervousness, of her overstrain, she had
lost a good deal of her mental poise; and she divined that the only help
for that was certainty of Dorn's fate. She could bear the shock if only
she could know positively. And leaning her face in her hands, with the
warm wind blowing her hair and bringing the rustle of the wheat, she
prayed for divination.

No answer! Absolutely no mystic consciousness of death--of an end to her
love here on earth! Instead of that breathed a strong physical presence
of life all about her, in the swelling, waving slopes of wheat, in the
beautiful butterflies, in the singing birds low down and the soaring
eagles high above--life beating and surging in her heart, her veins,
unquenchable and indomitable. It gave the lie to her morbidness. But it
seemed only a physical state. How could she find any tangible ho