friend!" she exclaimed. "A spy on
what--on my mother, on Minna, on me, on the flowers, as a part of this
monstrous game of trickery and lies that you are playing?"

There was no trace of anger in her tone. It was that of one mortally
hurt. Anger would have been easier to bear than the measuring,
penetrating wonder that found him guilty of such a horrible part. Those
eyes would have confused Partow himself with the steady, welling
intensity of their gaze. She did not see how his left hand was twitching
and how he stilled its movement by pressing it against the bench.

"You will take Feller with you when you go!" she said, rising.

Lanstron dropped his head in a kind of shaking throb of his whole body
and raised a face white with appeal.

"Marta!" He was speaking to a profile, very sensitive and yet like
ivory. "I've no excuse for such an abuse of hospitality except the
obesssion of a loathsome work that some man must do and I was set to do.
My God, Marta! I cease to be natural and human. I am a machine. I keep
thinking, what if war comes and some error of mine let the enemy know
where to strike the blow of victory; or if there were information I
might have gained and failed to gain that would have given us the
victory--if, because I had not done my part, thousands of lives of our
soldiers were sacrificed needlessly!"

At that she turned on him quickly, her face softening.

"You do think of that--the lives?"

"Yes, why shouldn't I?"

"Of those on your side!" she exclaimed, turning away.

"Yes, of those first," he replied. "And, Marta, I did not tell you why
Feller was here because he did not want me to, and I was curious to see
if he had sustained power enough to keep you from discovering his
simulation. I did not think he would remain. I thought that in a week he
would tire of the part. But now you must have the whole story. You will
listen?"

"I should not be fair if I did not, should I?" she replied, with a weary
shadow of a smile.

XI

MARTA HEARS FELLER'S STORY

To tell the story as Lanstron told it is to have it from the partisan
lips of a man speaking for a man out of the depths of a friendship grown
into the fibre of youth. It is better written by the detached narrator.

Gustave Feller's father had died when Gustave was twelve and his mother
found it easy to spoil an only son who was handsome and popular. He
suffered the misfortune of a mental brilliancy that learns too readily
and of a