She jumped off, and the big, ponderous thing, almost gifted with intelligence, it seemed to Lenore, rolled on with its whirring roar, drawing its cloud of dust, and leaving behind a litter of straw.
It developed then that Adams had walked along with the machine, and he now addressed her.
"Will you be staying here till your father comes?" he asked.
"No, Mr. Adams. Why do you ask?"
"You oughtn't come out here alone or go back alone.… All these strange men! Some of them hard customers! You'll excuse me, miss, but this harvest is not like other harvests."
"I'll wait for my father and I'll not go out of sight," replied Lenore. Thanking the foreman for his thoughtfulness, she walked away, and soon she stood at the edge of the first wheat-field.
The grain was not yet ripe but near at hand it was a pale gold. The wind, out of the west, waved and swept the wheat, while the almost imperceptible shadows followed.
A road half overgrown with grass and goldenrod bordered the wheat-field, and it wound away down toward the house. Her father appeared mounted on the white horse he always rode. Lenore sat down in the grass to wait for him. Nodding stalks of goldenrod leaned to her face. When looked at closely, how truly gold their color! Yet it was not such a gold as that of the rich blaze of ripe wheat. She was admitting to her consciousness a jealousy of anything comparable to wheat. And suddenly she confessed that her natural love for it had been augmented by a subtle growing sentiment. Not sentiment about the war or the need of the Allies or meaning of the staff of life. She had sensed young Dorn's passion for wheat and it had made a difference to her.
"No use lying to myself!" she soliloquized. "I think of him!.. I can't help it… I ran out here, wild, restless, unable to reason… just because I'd decided to see him again—to make sure I—I really didn't care.… How furious—how ridiculous I'll feel—when—when—"
Lenore did not complete her thought, because she was not sure. Nothing could be any truer than the fact that she had no idea how she would feel. She began sensitively to distrust herself. She who had always been so sure of motives, so contented with things as they were, had been struck by an absurd fancy that haunted because it was fiercely repudiated and scorned, that would give her no rest until it was proven false. But suppose it were true!