against the power of a man who set millions against millions in
slaughter to gratify personal ambition. She was thankful that she was
looking down as she spoke, for she could not bring herself to another
compliment. Her throat was too chilled for that yet.

"The one way to end the feud between the two nations was a war that
would mean permanent peace," he explained, seeing how quiet she was and
realizing, with a recollection of her children's oath, that he had gone
a little too far. He wanted to retain her admiration. It had become as
precious to him as a new delicacy to Lucullus.

"Yes, I understand," she managed to murmur; then she was able to look
up. "It's all so immense!" she added. "And you have yet another paper
there?" she said with a little gesture that might have been taken as the
expression of a hope that she was not overstaying her welcome.

"This is very interesting," he said, watching her narrowly now, "the
case of a private, one Hugo Mallin, who refused to fight because he was
against war on principle. Four charges: assault on a fellow soldier,
cowardice, treason, and insubordination under fire."

"Enough, I should say!" said Marta in a low tone.

"A question of which one to press--of an example," continued Westerling,
reading the full official statement for the first time.

"What is the punishment?" she asked.

"Why, of course, death!" he replied, somewhat absently, in
preoccupation. "Extraordinary! And they have located him, it seems He is
here at headquarters!"

"Yes; certainly," Marta said. "We found him under a tree, deserted and
wounded, labelled coward, and we cared for him."

"Indeed!" exclaimed Westerling. "He must have appealed strongly to your
sympathies."

There was no sharpness in the words, but he had lapsed from the personal
to the official manner.

"To my sense of humanity!" Her reply was made in much the same tone as
his remark, where he had expected emotion, even passion. More than ever
was he certain that she had undergone some revealing experience since he
had seen her in the capital. "Yes, to any one's sense of humanity--a
wounded, thirsty man in a fever!" There came, with a swift and mellowing
charm, the look of a fervent and exalted tenderness and the
pulse-arresting quiver of intensity that had swept over her at her first
sight of Hugo under the tree. "I know that he was not a coward in one
sense," she added, "for I saw him make the assault named in the first
charge.