rd the knoll with glazed eyes. She thought she was walking
fast as she started for the garden gate, but really she was going
slowly, stumblingly.

"I think you had better stop her if you can," said the general to his
aide.

The aide overtook her at the gate.

"We shall know about His Excellency before you can find out for
yourself," he said; and, young himself, he could put the sympathy of
youth with romance into his tone. "You might miss the road, even miss
him, when he was without a scratch, and be for hours in ignorance," he
explained. "In a few minutes we ought to have word."

Marta sank down weakly on the tongue of a wagon, overturned against the
garden wall in the melee of the retreat, and leaned her shoulder on the
wheel for support.

"If the women of the Grays waited four weeks," she said with an effort
at stoicism, "then I ought to be able to wait a few minutes."

"Depend on me. I'll bring news as soon as there is any," the aide
concluded, and, seeing that she wished to be alone, he left her.

For the first time she had real oblivion from the memory of her deceit
of Westerling, the oblivion of drear, heart-pulling suspense. All the
good times, the sweetly companionable times, she and Lanny had had
together; all his flashes of courtship, his outburst in their last
interview in the arbor, when she had told him that if she found that she
wanted to come to him she would come in a flame, passed in review under
the hard light of her petty ironies and sarcasms, which had the false
ring of coquetry to her now, genuine as they had been at the time.
Through her varying moods she had really loved him, and the thing that
had slumbered in her became the drier fuel for the flame--perhaps too
late.

Her thought, her feeling was as if he were not chief of staff, but a
private soldier, and she were not a woman who had girdled the world and
puckered her brow over the solution of problems, but a provincial girl
who had never been outside her village--his sweetheart. All questions of
the army following up its victory, of his responsibilities and her fears
that he would go on with conquest, faded into the fact of life--his
life, as the most precious thing in the world to her. For him, yes, for
him she had played the spy, as that village girl would for her lover,
thinking of warm embraces; for him she had kept steady under the strain.

Without him--what then? It seemed that the fatality that had let him
escape miraculousl