uick effect on his attitude.

"I beg pardon! I forgot!" he explained in his old man's voice, his head
sinking, his shoulders drooping in the humility of a servant who
recognizes that he has been properly rebuked for presumption. "Not a
gunner any more--I'm a spy!" he thought, as he shuffled off without
looking toward the batteries again, though the music of wheels and hoofs
was now close by. "I must turn my back on the guns, for they tempt me.
And I must win her consent before I shall have even the dignity of a
spy--and I will win it!" he added, brightening. "La, la, la! Trust me!"

Marta had a glimpse, as she turned away, of an appealingly pathetic
figure bent as under a wound to his spirits, which gave her a sense of
personal cruelty in the midst of a wave of pity and regret.

"He is what he is because of the army; a victim of a cult, a habit," she
was thinking. "Had he been in any other calling his fine qualities might
have been of service to the world and he would have been happy."

Then her sympathy was drawn to another object of war's injustice--a man
approaching under the guard of two soldiers. Suddenly the man planted
his feet and refused to budge.

"I tell you, it isn't fair!" he cried in rage and appeal. "I tell you, I
was only visiting on this side and got caught! I'm a reservist of the
first line. If I don't answer the call I'll be branded a shirker in my
village, and I've got to live in that village all my life. You better
kill me and have done with it!"

"Sorry," said one of the soldiers, "but you were caught trying to sneak.
We're acting under orders. No use of balking."

"Who wouldn't sneak?" demanded the prisoner desperately. "Oh, say, be a
little human! The worst of it is that I came over here to see my girl to
say good-by to her. I'm going to marry her," he pleaded, "though my
folks are against it because she's a Brown. It makes me so cheap--it--"

"We were told to take you to the general. He'll let you off if there
isn't any war, and he may, anyway. But he sure won't if you resist
arrest." The soldiers seized his arms firmly. "Come along!" they said,
and he went. Any one must go when a steel claw of the demon enforces
the order.

A company of infantry resting among their stacked rifles changed the
color of the square in the distance from the gray of pavement to the
brown of a mass of uniforms. In the middle of the main street a major of
the brigade staff, with a number of junior officers and