his own--the very top of Olympus, and he likes the
prospect," Marta replied.

The only home news of importance that her mother had to impart related
to a tiny strip of paper with the greeting, "Hello, Marta!" that had
been dropped from the pilot aeroplane as the Brown aerial squadron flew
over the garden after its race with the Gray. She noted Marta's
customary quickening interest at mention of Lanstron's name. It had
become the talisman of a hope whose fulfilment was always being
deferred.

"How different Lanny and Westerling are!" Marta exclaimed, the picture
of the two men rising before her vision. "Lanny trying so hard under the
pressure of his responsibility not to be human and unable to forget
himself, and Westerling trying, really trying, to be human at times, but
unable to forget that he is Jove! Did you wave your acknowledgments to
Lanny,'?"

"Why, no! How could I?" asked Mrs. Galland. "He went over so fast I
didn't know it was he--a little figure so far overhead."

"It's odd, but I think I'd know Lanny a mile away by a sort of
instinct," said Marta. "You know I'd like a gun that would fire a bomb
and drop a message of 'Hello, yourself!' right on his knee. Wouldn't
that give him a surprise?"

"You and he are so full of nonsense that you--" But Mrs. Galland
desisted. What was the use?

Sometimes she wished that Colonel Lanstron would stay away altogether
and leave a free field for a newcomer. Yet if two or three weeks passed
without a call from him she was apprehensive. Besides being one of the
Thorbourg Lanstrons, he was a most charming, capable man, who had risen
very rapidly in his profession. It had been only six months after he had
bolted up from the wreck of his plane by way of self-introduction to
Marta before he alighted in the field across the road from the garden to
report a promise kept.

Once she knew that he was a Lanstron of Thorbourg, a fact of hardly
passing interest to Marta, Mrs. Galland made him intimately welcome. By
the time he had paid his third call he was Lanny to Marta and she was
Marta to him, quite as if they had known each other from childhood. She
had a gift for unaffected comradeship. He was the kind of man with whom
she could be a comrade. There was always something to say the moment
they met and they were never through talking when he had to go. They
disagreed so often that Mrs. Galland thought they made a business of it.
She wondered how real friendship could exist betwe