king certain keys, certain chords
responded. He could probe the depths of their minds, he thought, in a
single evening. Then he passed on, unless it was in the interest of
pleasure or of his career to linger. This meeting had left his curiosity
baffled. He understood how Marta's vitality demanded action, which
exerted itself in a feminine way for a feminine cause. The cure for such
a fad was most clear to his masculine-perception. What if all the power
she had shown in her appeal for peace could be made to serve another
ambition? He knew that he was a great man. More than once he had
wondered what would happen if he were to meet a great woman. And he
should not see Marta Galland again unless war came.

VII

TIMES HAVE CHANGED

A prodigious brown worm, its body turning and rising and falling with
the grade and throbbing with the march of its centipede feet, wound its
way along a rising mountain road. In the strong, youthful figures set in
the universal type of military mould it might have been a regiment of
any one of many nations' but the tint of its uniform was the brown of
the nine hundred regiments that prepared for war against the gray of the
fifteen hundred under Hedworth Westerling.

The 53d of the Browns had started for La Tir on the same day that the
128th of the Grays had started for South La Tir. While the 128th was
going to new scenes, the 53d was returning to familiar ground. It had
detrained in the capital of the province from which its ranks had been
recruited. After a steep incline, there was a welcome bugle note and
with shouts of delight the centipede's legs broke apart! Bankers',
laborers', doctors', valets', butchers', manufacturers', and judges'
sons threw themselves down on the greensward of the embankment to rest.
With their talk of home, of relatives whom they had met at the station,
and of the changes in the town was mingled talk of the crisis.

Meanwhile, an aged man was approaching. At times he would break into a
kind of trot that ended, after a few steps, in shortness of breath. He
was quite withered, his bright eyes twinkling out of an area of moth
patches, and he wore a frayed uniform coat with a medal on the breast.

"Is this the 53d?" he quavered to the nearest soldier

"It certainly is!" some one answered. "Come and join us, veteran!"

"Is Tom--Tom Fragini here?"

The answer came from a big soldier, who sprang to his feet and leaped
toward the old man.

"It's grandfath