"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 helpless she felt—how she prayed for inspiration—for wisdom!
"Pay!… How?" she asked.