ling that you think that I do not regard this
as your veranda, your garden, your home, sacred by more than the laws of
war--by an old friendship!"

He made his appeal finely, as he well knew how to do. A certain magnetic
eloquence that went well with his handsome face and sturdy bearing had
been his most successful asset in making him chief of staff.

The tattoo of her fingers died down while she listened to his final,
serious reasons about a subject that became peculiarly significant; and
her brows lifted, her eyes opened in the surprise of one who gets a
sudden new angle of light.

"You put it very well. In that case--" she said, and his glance and hers
dropped, his to the capable hand on the handle of the teapot, hers into
the cup. "With the honors of war and officers permitted to retain their
side-arms?" she asked.

"Yes; oh, yes!" he answered happily.

She smiled her acknowledgment with just that self-respect of
capitulation which flatters the victor with the thought that he has
overcome no mean opponent--the highest form of compliment known to the
guild of courtiers.

He was susceptible to it and, in turn, to the curiosity about her that
had remained unsatisfied at the end of their talk in the hotel. Her own
veranda was the natural, familiar place to judge the work of time in
those character-forming years from seventeen to twenty-seven. She was
not like what she had been in the artificial surroundings of a fortnight
ago. She filled the eye and the mind now in the well-knit suppleness of
figure and the finished maturity of features which bore the mark of
inner growth of knowledge of life. She was not a species of intellectual
exotic, as he had feared, too baffling to allow the male intellect to
feel comfortable, but very much, as he noted discriminatingly, a woman
in all the physical freshness of a woman in her prime.

"Just like the old days, isn't it?" he exclaimed with his first sip,
convinced that the officers' commissary supplied excellent tea in the
field.

"Yes, for the moment--if we forget the war!" she replied, and looked
away, preoccupied, toward the landscape.

If we forget the war! She bore on the words rather grimly. The change
that he had noted between the Marta of the hotel reception-room and the
Marta of the moment was not altogether the work of ten years. It had
developed since she was in the capital. In these three weeks war had
been brought to her door. She had been under heavy fire. Y