the motion.
Then the prone, gray forms vanished in the black gulf of Dorn's brain.

"Lenore will never know--how my Huns come back to me," he whispered.

Night with its trains of stars! Softly the darkness unfolded down over
the dim hills, lonely, tranquil, sweet. A night-bird caroled. The song
of insects, very faint and low, came to him like a still, sad music of
humanity, from over the hills, far away, in the strife-ridden world. The
world of men was there and life was incessant, monstrous, and
inconceivable. This old home of his--the old house seemed full of
well-remembered sounds of mouse and cricket and leaf against the roof
and soft night wind at the eaves--sounds that brought his boyhood back,
his bare feet on the stairs, his father's aloofness, his mother's love.

* * * * *

Then clearly floated to him a slow sweeping rustle of the wheat.
Breast-high it stood down there, outside his window, a moving body,
higher than the gloom. That rustle was a voice of childhood, youth, and
manhood, whispering to him, thrilling as never before. It was a growing
rustle, different from that when the wheat had matured. It seemed to
change and grow in volume, in meaning. The night wind bore it, but
life--bursting life was behind it, and behind that seemed to come a
driving and a mighty spirit. Beyond the growth of the wheat, beyond its
life and perennial gift, was something measureless and obscure, infinite
and universal. Suddenly Dorn saw that something as the breath and the
blood and the spirit of wheat--and of man. Dust and to dust returned
they might be, but this physical form was only the fleeting inscrutable
moment on earth, springing up, giving birth to seed, dying out for that
ever-increasing purpose which ran through the ages.

A soft footfall sounded on the stairs. Lenore came. She leaned over him
and the starlight fell upon her face, sweet, luminous, beautiful. In the
sense of her compelling presence, in the tender touch of her hands, in
the whisper of woman's love, Dorn felt uplifted high above the dark pale
of the present with its war and pain and clouded mind to wheat--to the
fertile fields of a golden age to come.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Desert of Wheat, by Zane Grey

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