w me!" he exclaimed. "But I did it well, didn't I?" he asked,
after a pause.

"Beautifully. I repeat, it was convincingly real," she replied, laughing
in relief.

"If I hadn't, it would have been most disappointing after all my
rehearsals," he went on. "Yes, you know me! Why, I might have been
wanting to break the engagement in a week because I was beginning other
rehearsals!" He laughed, too, as if relishing the prospect. "Yes, I
act--act always, except with the guns. They alone are real!" he burst
out in joyous fury. "We are going on, I and my guns, on to the best
yet--on in the pursuit! Nothing can stop us! We shall hit the Grays so
fast and hard that they can never get their machine in order again. God
bless you! Everything that is fine in me will always think finely of
you! You and Lanny--two fixed stars for me!"

"Truly!" She was radiant. "Truly?" she asked wistfully.

"Yes, yes--a yes as real as the guns!"

"Then it helps! Oh, how it helps!" she murmured almost inaudibly.

"Good-by! God bless you!" he cried as he started to go, adding over his
shoulder merrily: "I'll send you a picture post-card from the Grays'
capital of my guns parked in the palace square."

She watched him leap the garden wall as lightly as he had come and
gallop away, an impersonation of the gay, adventurous spirit of war,
counting death and wounds and hardship as the delights of the gamble.
Yes, he would follow the Grays, throwing shells in the irresponsible joy
of tossing confetti in a carnival. Pursuit! Was Feller's the sentiment
of the army? Were the Browns not to stop at the frontier? Were they to
change their song to, "Now we have ours we shall take some of theirs"?
The thought was fresh fuel to the live coals that still remained under
the ashes.

A brigade commander and some of his staff-officers near by formed a
group with faces intent around an operator who was attaching his
instrument to a field-wire that had just been reeled over the hedge.
Marta moved toward them, but paused on hearing an outburst of jubilant
exclamations:

"A hundred thousand prisoners!"

"And five hundred guns!"

"We're closing in on their frontier all along the line!"

"It's incredible!"

"But the word is official--it's right!"

From mouth to mouth--a hundred thousand prisoners, five hundred
guns--the news was passed in the garden. Eyes dull with fatigue began
flashing as the soldiers broke into a cheer that was not led, a cheer
unlike any Ma