g the only remaining paper.

"Yes, I want to go into that--it's a question of policy," said
Westerling.

He had taken up the paper thoughtfully after Turcas withdrew, when he
looked up to Marta in answer to a movement in her chair. She had bent
forward in a pose that freed her figure from the chair-back in an
outline of suppleness and firmness; her lips were parted, showing a
faint line of the white of her teeth, and he caught her gazing at him in
a kind of wondering admiration. But she dropped her eyelids instantly
and said deliberately, less to him than to herself:

"You have the gift!"

No tea-table flattery that, he knew; only the reflection of a fact whose
existence had been borne in on her by observation.

"The gift? How?" he inquired, speaking to the fringe of hair that half
hid her lowered face.

She looked up, smiling brightly.

"You don't know what gift! Not the pianist's! Not the poet's!" (Oh, to
save Hugo! The method she had chosen to save him, alien to all her
impulses, born of the war's stress on her mind, seemed the wise one in
view of her knowledge of the man before her) "Why, of course, the
supreme gift of command! The thing that made you chief of staff! And the
war goes well for you, doesn't it?"

Delicious morsel, this, to a connoisseur in compliments! He tasted it
with the same self-satisfied smile that he had her first prophecy. To
her who had then voiced a secret he had shared with no one, as his chest
swelled with a full breath, he bared another in the delight of the
impression he had made on her.

"Yes, as you foresaw--as I planned!" he said. "Yes, I planned all, step
by step, till I was chief of staff and ready. I convinced the premier
that it was time to strike and I chose the hour to strike; for Bodlapoo
was only a convenient excuse for the last of all the steps"

The subjective enjoyment of the declaration kept him from any keen
notice of the effect of his words. Lanny was right. It had been a war of
deliberate conquest; a war to gratify personal ambition. All her life
Marta would be able to live over again the feelings of this moment. It
was as if she were frozen, all except brain and nerves, which were on
fire, while the rigidity of ice kept her from springing from her chair
in contempt and horror. She would always wonder how the bonds of her
purpose to save Hugo held her tongue But still another purpose came on
the wings of diabolical temptation which would pit the art of woman