eated
herself by the window, which had often spread the broadening vista of
landscape with its lessening detail before her eyes.

On other nights she had looked out into opaqueness with the drum-beat of
rain on the roof; into the faint starlight when there was only the
vagueness of heights and levels; into the harvest moonlight with its
spectral unreality. Now the symbol of what the ear had heard the eye
saw: war, working in tones of the landscape by day with smokeless
powder; war, revealed by its tongues of flame at night. Ugly bursts of
fire from the higher hills spread to the heavens like an aurora borealis
and broke their messengers in sheets of flame over the lower hills--the
batteries of the Browns sprinkling death about the heads of the gunners
of the Grays emplacing their batteries. Staccato flashes from a single
point counted so many bullets from an automatic, which, directed by the
beams of the search-lights, found their targets in sections of advancing
infantry. Hill crests, set off with flashes running back and forth,
demarked infantry lines of the Browns assisting the automatics.

There were lulls between the crashes of the small arms and the heavy,
throaty speech of the guns; lulls that seemed to say that both sides had
paused for a breathing spell; lulls that allowed the battle in the
distance to be heard in its pervasive undertone. In one Of them, when
even the undertone had ceased for a few seconds, Marta caught faintly
the groans of a wounded man--one of the crew of a Gray dirigible burned
by an explosion and brought in his agony softly to earth by a billowing
piece of envelope which acted as a parachute.

Fighting proceeded in La Tir in stages of ferocity and blank silence.
The upper part of the town, which the Browns still held, was in
darkness; the lower part, where the Grays were, was illuminated.

"Another one of Lanny's plans!" thought Marta. "He would have them work
in the light, while we fire out of obscurity!"

Soon all the town was in darkness, for the Grays had cut the wire in the
main conduit shortly after she had heard the groans of the wounded man.
There the automatics broke out in a mad storm, voicing their feelings at
getting a company in close order in a street for the space of a minute,
before those who escaped could plaster themselves against doorways or
find cover in alleys. Then silence from the automatics and a cheer from
the Browns that rasped out its triumph like the rubbing