s floating from a staff
on the outskirts of the town, and slowly, glowingly, the light rippling
on its folds was reflected in her face.

"She is for us! She is a Gray!" he thought triumphantly. The woman and
the flag! The matter-of-fact staff-officer felt the thrill of sentiment.

"I think we can arrange it," Marta announced with a rare smile of
assent.

"Then I'll go back to town and set the signal-corps men to work," he
said.

"And when you come you will find the house at your disposal," she
assured him.

Except that he was raising his cap instead of saluting, he was conscious
of withdrawing with the deference due to a superior.

In place of the smile, after he had gone, came a frown and a look in her
eyes as if at something revolting; then the smile returned, to be
succeeded by the frown, which was followed by an indeterminate shaking
of the head.

The roar of battle kept up its steady refrain in the direction of the
range. Marta had heard it when she fell asleep and heard it when she
awakened. A battery of heavy guns of the Grays broke their flashes from
a knoll this side of the one where Dellarme's men had made their first
stand. At the foot of the garden, where yesterday she had distributed
flowers to the wounded Browns, a regiment of Gray infantry was marching
past a train of siege-guns. All the figures moving on the landscape,
which yesterday had been brown, had changed to gray. The Grays were
masters of the town and all the neighborhood.

Marta stepped down from the veranda in response to the call of the open
air to physical vigor renewed after sweet sleep. Rather than return
directly to the kitchen, where breakfast was waiting, she would go
around the house. She stopped before a Japanese maple which had been
split by a shell striking in a crotch. Was there any hope of saving it?
No. She turned white about the lips, with red spots on her cheeks, and
at length nodded her head as if in answer to some inward question.

Over the sward, cut by shell fragments, lay torn limbs and bits of bark,
and in the shade of a tree near the road she had a glimpse of the
shoulder of the gray uniform of a prostrate man. The rest of him was
hidden by the low-hanging branches of one of the Norway spruces which
bordered the estate at this point. Another step and she saw a circular
red spot on a white leg bandage; another, and a white square of paper
pinned to a blouse; another, and she identified the wounded man as her
he