ouchard grudgingly as Marta saw him to the door.

"On the contrary, thank you! It was such fun--if I hadn't been so
scared," replied Marta, and their gaze held each other fast in a
challenge, hers beaming good nature and his saturnine in its rebuff and
a hound-like tenacity of purpose, saying plainly that his suspicions
were not yet laid.

When Bouchard returned to his desk he guessed the contents of the note
awaiting him, but he took a long time to read its stereotyped
expressions in transferring him to perfunctory duty well to the rear of
the army. Then he pulled himself together and, leaden-hearted, settled
down to arrange routine details for his departure, while the rest of the
staff was immersed in the activity of the preparations for the attack on
Engadir. He knew that he could not sleep if he lay down. So he spent the
night at work. In the morning his successor, a young man whom he himself
had chosen and trained, Colonel Bellini, appeared, and the fallen man
received the rising man with forced official courtesy.

"In my own defence and for your aid," he said, "I show you a copy of
what I have just written to General Westerling."

A brief note it was, in farewell, beginning with conventional thanks for
Westerling's confidence in the past.

"I am punished for being right," it concluded. "It is my belief that
Miss Galland sends news to the enemy and that she draws it from you
without your consciousness of the fact. I tell you honestly. Do what you
will with me."

It took more courage than any act of his life for the loyal Bouchard to
dare such candor to a superior. Seeing the patchy, yellow, bloodless
face drawn in stiff lines and the abysmal stare of the deep-set eyes in
their bony recesses, Bellini was swept with a wave of sympathy.

"Thank you, Bouchard. You've been very fine!" said Bellini as he grasped
Bouchard's hand, which was icy cold.

"My duty--my duty, in the hope that we shall kill two Browns for every
Gray who has fallen--that we shall yet see them starved and besieged and
crying for mercy in their capital," replied Bouchard. He saluted with a
dismal, urgent formality and stalked out of the room with the tread of
the ghost of Hamlet's father.

The strange impression that this farewell left with Bellini still
lingered when, a few moments later, Westerling summoned him. Not alone
the diffidence of a new member of the staff going into the Presence
accounted for the stir in his temples, as he wait