ally as in any business requiring team-work, with
an every-day smile like Hugo's on their lips.

"Then," Westerling began, and broke off abruptly. His eyes sought Marta.

The affair seemed to have worn on her nerves also. There was a
distinctly appreciable effort at self-control in the slow way that she
turned her head. The flame in her eyes was suddenly suffused in a liquid
glance which slowly brightened with a suggestion.

"It is extraordinary!" she breathed. "Don't you think that the blow on
his head and the fever afterward has something to do with it?"

Hugo answered for himself.

"My views are the same as they were before the blow and the act that
brought the blow!" he said, with a slight cast of the eye toward Marta
which intimated that he wanted no help from the deserter of the
principles which she had professed to him previously.

She shuddered as if hurt, but only momentarily.

"Psychological, I suppose--psychological and irresponsible abnormality!"
she murmured, avoiding Hugo's look and bending her own on Westerling
persistently.

"Long words!" said Hugo. "Insanity is shorter."

But Westerling did not seem to hear. His thought was shaped by the
superb misery and sensitiveness in Marta's face. He had done wrong to
ask her to remain. Of course the scene had been painful to her. She
would not be herself if she wanted to see a man tried for his life. He
knew that views not unlike Hugo's were latent in many minds lacking
Hugo's initiative that would respond to the right impulse. A way out
occurred to him as inspiration, which pleased his sense of craft. The
press, which the premier reported was irritated by his censorship--the
press which must have sensation, the traffic of its trade--should have a
detailed account of how one of our indomitable regiments placarded a
private as coward, proving thereby that the army was a unit of
aggressive zeal.

"You are alone--one man in a million in your ideas!" he declared, with
judicial gravity. "We shall postpone your trial and leave public opinion
to punish you. Your story will be given to the press in full; your name
will be a byword throughout the land, an example, and while you are
convalescing you will remain a prisoner. When you are well we shall have
another talk I may give you a chance, for the sake of your father and
mother and your sweetheart and the good opinion of your neighbors, to
redeem yourself."

"I had to tell you what I felt, sir," said Hugo. "T