aid Marta, with a look at the sunset glow
as if she resented the loss of a minute of it.

"There has been a leak of information to the Browns!" he announced.

"There has! And he was intelligence officer, wasn't he?" she asked,
turning to Westerling, her curiosity apparently roused as a matter of
courtesy to his own interest in the subject.

"Who do you think he accused? Why, _you_," he added, with a peculiar
laugh.

She noted the peculiarity of the laugh discriminatingly.

"Oh!" Her eyes opened wide in wonder--only wonder, at first. Then, as
comprehension took the place of wonder, they grew sympathetic. "That
explains!" she exclaimed. "His hateful glances were those of delusion.
He was going mad, you mean?"

"Yes," said Westerling, "that--that would explain it!"

"I have been told that when people go mad they always ascribe every
injury done to them to the person who happens to have excited their
dislike," she mused.

"Which seems to have been the case here," Westerling assented. He did
not know what else to say.

"It was the strain of war, wasn't it?" Marta proceeded thoughtfully. "I
notice that all the staff-officers are showing it; that is," she added
on second thought, quite literally, as she regarded him for an instant
of silence, "all except you. You remain the same, calm and decisive."
There she looked away with a flutter of her lashes, as if she were
shamed at having allowed herself to be caught in open admiration of him.
"Look! The last effulgence of rose!" she went on hurriedly about the
sunset. "Why shouldn't we think of the sky as heaven, as Nirvana? What
better immortality than to be absorbed into that?"

"None!" he agreed, but he was looking at her rather than at the sky. His
pride was recovering its natural confidence in the infallibility of his
judgment of human beings. He was seeing his suspicions as ridiculous
enough to convict him of a brain as disordered as Bouchard's.

Marta was thinking that she had been skating on very thin ice and that
she must go on skating till she broke through. There was an exhilaration
about it that she could not resist: the exhilaration of risk and the
control of her faculties, prompted by a purpose hypnotically compelling.
Both were silent, she watching the sky, he in anticipation and suspense.
The rose went violet and the shadows over the range deepened.

"The guns and the troops wait. With darkness the music begins!" he said
slowly, with a sort of stern fer