o read to the amazed staff, for Partow's message had
looked far into the future. Then there was a P.S., written after the war
had begun, on the evening of the day that Marta had gone from tea on the
veranda with Westerling to the telephone, in the impulse of her new
purpose.

"I begin to believe in that dream," he wrote. "I begin to believe that
the chance for the offensive will come, now that my colleague, Miss
Galland, in the name of peace has turned practical. There is nothing
like mixing a little practice in your dreams while the world is still
well this side of Utopia, as the head on my old behemoth of a body well
knows. She had the right idea with her school. The oath so completely
expressed my ideas--the result of all my thinking--that I had a twinge
of literary jealousy. My boy, if you do reach the frontier, in pursuit
of a broken army, and you do not keep faith with my dream and with her
ideals, then you will get a lesson that will last you forever at the
foot of the Gray range. But I do not think so badly as that of you or of
my judgment of men."

"Lanny! Lanny!"

The dignity of a staff council could not restrain Marta. Her emotion
must have action. She sprang to his side and seized his hand, her
exultation mixed with penitence over the why she had wronged him and
Partow. Their self-contained purpose had been the same as hers and they
had worked with a soldier's fortitude, while she had worked with whims
and impulses. She bent over him with gratitude and praise and a plea for
forgiveness in her eyes, submerging the thing which he sought in them.
He flushed boyishly in happy embarrassment, incapable of words for an
instant; and silently the staff looked on.

"And I agree with Partow," Lanstron went on, "that we cannot take the
range. The Grays still have numbers equal to ours. It is they, now, who
will be singing 'God with us!' with their backs against the wall. With
Partow's goes my own appeal to the army and the nation; and I shall keep
faith with Partow, with Miss Galland, and with my own ideas, if the
government orders the army to advance, by resigning as chief of
staff--my work finished."

Westerling and his aide and valet, inquiring their way as strangers,
found the new staff headquarters of the Grays established in an army
building, where Bouchard had been assigned to trivial duties, back of
the Gray range. As their former chief entered a room in the disorder of
maps and packing-cases, the staff-of