ld on
realities?

She lifted her face to the lonely sky, and her hands pressed to her
breast where the deep ache throbbed heavily.

"It's not that I can't give him up," she whispered, as if impelled to
speak. "I _can_. I _have_ given him up. It's this torture of suspense.
Oh, not to _know!_... But if that newspaper had claimed him one of the
killed, I'd not believe."

So Lenore trusted more to the mystic whisper of her woman's soul than to
all the unproven outward things. Still trust as she might, the voice of
the world dinned in her ears, and between the two she was on the rack.
Loss of Jim--loss of her mother--what unfilled gulfs in her heart! She
was one who loved only few, but these deeply. To-day when they were gone
was different from yesterday when they were here--different because
memory recalled actual words, deeds, kisses of loved ones whose life was
ended. Utterly futile was it for Lenore to try to think of Dorn in that
way. She saw his stalwart form down through the summer haze, coming with
his springy stride through the wheat. Yet--the words--mortally wounded!
They had burned into her thought so that when she closed her eyes she
saw them, darkly red, against the blindness of sight. Pain was a
sluggish stream with source high in her breast, and it moved with her
unquickened blood. If Dorn were really dead, what would become of her?
Selfish question for a girl whose lover had died for his country! She
would work, she would be worthy of him, she would never pine, she would
live to remember. But, ah! the difference to her! Never for her who had
so loved the open, the silken rustle of the wheat and the waving
shadows, the green-and-gold slopes, the birds of the air and the beasts
of the field, the voice of child and the sweetness of life--never again
would these be the same to her, if Dorn were gone forever.

That ache in her heart had communicated itself to all her being. It
filled her mind and her body. Tears stung her eyes, and again they were
dry when tears would have soothed. Just as any other girl she wept, and
then she burned with fever. A longing she had only faintly known, a
physical thing which she had resisted, had become real, insistent,
beating. Through love and loss she was to be denied a heritage common to
all women. A weariness dragged at her. Noble spirit was not a natural
thing. It must be intelligence seeing the higher. But to be human was to
love life, to hate death, to faint under loss, t