divine of gifts had been granted him--an opportunity to
save her from harm, perhaps from death. He had served her father. How
greatly he could not tell, but if measured by the gratitude in her eyes
it would have been infinite. He recalled that expression--blue, warm,
soft, and indescribably strange with its unuttered hidden meaning. It
was all-satisfying for him to realize that she had been compelled to
give him a separate and distinct place in her mind. He must stand apart
from all others she knew. It had been his fortune to preserve her
happiness and the happiness that she must be to sisters and mother, and
that some day she would bestow upon some lucky man. They would all owe
it to him. And Lenore Anderson knew he loved her.

These things had transformed his relation of thought toward her. He had
no regret, no jealousy, no fear. Even the pang of suppressed and
overwhelming love had gone with his confession.

But he did remember her presence, her beauty, her intent blue glance,
and the faint, dreaming smile of her lips--remembered them with a
thrill, and a wave of emotion, and a contraction of his heart. He had
promised to see her once more, to afford her the opportunity, no doubt,
to thank him, to try to make him see her gratitude. He would go, but he
wished it need not be. He asked no more. And seeing her again might
change his fulness of joy to something of pain.

So Kurt trod the long road in the darkness and silence, pausing, and
checking his dreams now and then, to listen and to watch. He heard no
suspicious sounds, nor did he meet any one. The night was melancholy,
with a hint of fall in its cool breath.

Soon he would be walking a beat in one of the training-camps, with a
bugle-call in his ears and the turmoil of thousands of soldiers in the
making around him: soon, too, he would be walking the deck of a
transport, looking back down the moon-blanched wake of the ship toward
home, listening to the mysterious moan of the ocean; and then soon
feeling under his feet the soil of a foreign country, with hideous and
incomparable war shrieking its shell furies and its man anguish all
about him. But no matter how far away he ever got, he knew Lenore
Anderson would be with him as she was there on that dim, lonely starlit
country road.

And in these long hours of his vigil Kurt Dorn divined a relation
between his love for Lenore Anderson and a terrible need that had grown
upon him. A need of his heart and his soul!