He sprang up, sending dishes to the floor
with a crash. He bent over to pound the table with a fist. Violent
speech choked him and he felt a cold, tight blanching of his face.

"Listen!" he rang out. "If I go to Germany it'll be as a soldier--to
kill Germans!... I'm done--I'm through with the very name.... Listen to
the last words I'll ever speak to you in German--the last! _To hell with
Germany_!"

Then Kurt plunged, blind in his passion, out of the door into the night.
And as he went he heard his father cry out, brokenly:

"My son! Oh, my son!"

The night was dark and cool. A faint wind blew across the hills, and it
was dry, redolent, sweet. The sky seemed an endless curving canopy of
dark blue blazing with myriads of stars.

Kurt staggered out of the yard, down along the edge of a wheat-field, to
one of the straw-stacks, and there he flung himself down in an agony.

"Oh, I'm ruined--ruined!" he moaned. "The break--has come!... Poor old
dad!"

He leaned there against the straw, shaking and throbbing, with a cold
perspiration bathing face and body. Even the palms of his hands were
wet. A terrible fit of anger was beginning to loose its hold upon him.
His breathing was labored in gasps and sobs. Unutterable stupidity of
his father--horrible cruelty of his position! What had he ever done in
all his life to suffer under such a curse? Yet almost he clung to his
wrath, for it had been righteous. That thing, that infernal twist in the
brain, that was what was wrong with his father. His father who had been
fifty years in the United States! How simple, then, to understand what
was wrong with Germany.

"By God! I am--American!" he panted, and it was as if he called to the
grave of his mother, over there on the dark, windy hill.

That tremendous uprising of his passion had been a vortex, an end, a
decision. And he realized that even to that hour there had been a drag
in his blood. It was over now. The hell was done with. His soul was
free. This weak, quaking body of his housed his tainted blood and the
emotions of his heart, but it could not control his mind, his will. Beat
by beat the helpless fury in him subsided, and then he fell back and lay
still for a long time, eyes shut, relaxed and still.

A hound bayed mournfully; the insects chirped low, incessantly; the
night wind rustled the silken heads of wheat.

After a while the young man sat up and looked at the heavens, at the
twinkling white stars, and then away