All that he knew, or fancied he knew, was that even when she had broken with Morgan she had felt no need of him, and it had been her callous wish to live as if she had never known him. Since love is set in the most delicate and intricate bearings of life, and holds in its own core the possibilities of hate, he fancied that he felt for the Anne Masters of his past adoration the present contempt due a woman who had been able only to trifle with a life she had shaped. Because, too, she had once saved that life from its threatened smirching, the gratitude which might have been his most treasured sentiment became to him an intolerable obligation. Standing there by the door, the man's face darkened, until for the moment it wore again the sombre and sullen hate that had marred its boyhood. The hands at his side closed into fists, and looking off across the hills, he said aloud: "It was a dream that well-nigh wrecked me. I never want to see her or hear of her again!" But after a moment the bitterness turned to longing, and with an indignant voice, as though denouncing an enemy who stood before him, he broke out tempestuously: "That's a lie! You love her.... You always will!" Then around the abrupt turn of the road came a horseman, and Boone recognized him, with astonishment, as Morgan Wallifarro, dust-covered and mounted on a livery beast. But the Morgan who dismounted by the rail fence wore a face aged in a fashion that startled Boone. He was not the kidney that burns out in a few years of strenuosity, but a man with a mind of steel and a body of whipcord, and now his eyes were lined and ringed as they should not have been until his hair had turned white. Boone supposed that some matter of party consultation had brought his unannounced guest, since they were both now men of leadership, so he inquired, after they had shaken hands: "Is it politics, Morgan?" Wallifarro nodded. "In part that," he answered slowly, "but it's hard to pin one's mind down to party details today, Boone. It's like whistling a petty tune into the teeth of a hurricane." "Hurricane?" Boone repeated the final word in a puzzled tone. "I don't follow you." "My God, man," exclaimed the other, in sheer and undisguised amazement, "don't you know?" "Know what? Remember that I've been in the backwoods for three weeks," smiled the hillsman, "and I haven't seen a paper for ten days." Again for a moment the Louisville lawyer stood incredulously silent; then he said sharply: "The war.... It's four days old and more.... Austria, Servia, Germany, Russia, France! They are all in it--and yesterday England came in." The face of the member of the Foreign Affairs Committee wore a stunned blankness, and the blood went out of it. From the tree across the road the woodpecker began once more his hammering, and about the hoofs of the hitched horse drifted a cloud of pale-yellow butterflies. Finally Boone asked in a husky voice: "What of us?"