ess, his gift of making the lived moment the
greatest of his life, was the very gift she had craved to make her
forget her yesterdays. Only faintly did she hear his next outburst,
until he came to the end.

"I come with the question which I had sealed in my lonely heart," he was
saying, "while I lived a lie and trimmed rose-bushes and hung on your
words. You saved me. I fought for you. You were in my eyes, in my
angers, in my brain as I directed the fire of my guns. 'She will be
pleased to hear that I am a colonel!' I kept thinking. I love you! I
love you!"

Marta started up from her chair, her eyes moist and open wide, amazed,
but growing kind and troubled. Had she been guilty of giving him hope?
Was there something in her that had led him on, a shame that came
natural to her since she had let Westerling proceed with his love? Her
guilt in Feller's case was worse than in Westerling's. A thousand
Westerlings were not worth one Feller. And he had been near her, near as
a comrade, in imagination, with his ready suggestions of how to play her
part in its most exacting moments! While he stood, the picture of the
eager, impatient lover trembling for an answer that seemed to mean
heaven or perdition for him, the kindness that went with the trouble in
her eyes warmed to fondness, as she laid her fingers on his shoulder.

"You would want me to love you, wouldn't you?" she asked gently. "And if
I cannot? Yes, if I can neither act nor play at love, so real must love
be to me?"

He turned miserable, with eyes seeming to sink into his head, and body
to wilt in the dejection of that pitiful, hopeless attitude when his
secret had been discovered in the tower sitting-room.

"Act! Act!" he murmured.

"Yes." Her fingers exercised the faintest pressure on his shoulder.
"Your true love, your one enduring love, is the guns. All other loves
come and go. To-morrow, if not, next day, in this big, throbbing world,
with your future assured, as you lived other great moments you would
look back on this moment as another part that you had acted--and so
beautifully acted."

"Act! Act!" he repeated, like one who is coming to grip with facts.

For a period he stared at the ground before he reached for the hand on
his shoulder, which he pressed in both of his, looking soberly into her
eyes. He smiled; smiled apparently at a memory, let her hand drop, and
raised his own hands, palms out, in a gesture of good-humored
comprehension.

"You kno