the most brilliant feats of arms in the history of the
pass. He had the advantage of the baron in that he could read and write,
though with difficulty. Marta had an idea that he was not presentable at
a tea-table; however, he must have been more so than the baron, who, she
guessed, would have grabbed all the cakes on the plate as a sheer matter
of habit in taking what he wanted unless a stronger than he interfered.

Even the tower, raised to the glory of an older family whose
descendants, if any survived, were unaware of their lineage, had become
known as the Galland tower. The Gallands were rooted in the soil of the
frontier; they were used to having war's hot breath blow past their
door; they were at home in the language and customs of two peoples;
theirs was a peculiar tradition, which Marta had absorbed with her first
breath. Every detail of her circumscribed existence reminded her that
she was a Galland.

Town and plain and range were the first vista of landscape that she had
seen; doubtless they would be the last. Meanwhile, there was the
horizon. She was particularly fond of looking at it. If you are
seventeen, with a fanciful mind, you can find much information not in
histories or encyclopaedias or the curricula of schools in the horizon.

There she had learned that the Roman aristocrat had turned his thumb
down to a lot of barbarian captives because he had a fit of indigestion,
and the next day, when his digestion was better, he had scattered coins
among barbarian children; that Napoleon, who had also gone over the pass
road, was a pompous, fat little man, who did not always wipe his upper
lip clean of snuff when he was on a campaign; that the baron's youngest
daughter had lost her eyesight from a bodkin thrust for telling her
sister, who had her father's temper, that she was developing a double
chin.

For the people of Maria's visions were humanly real to her, and as such
she liked and understood them. If the first Galland were half a robber,
to disguise the fact because he was her ancestor was not playing fair.
It made him only a lay figure of romance.

One or two afternoons a week Colonel Hedworth Westerling, commander of
the regimental post of the Grays on the other side of the white posts,
stretched his privilege of crossing the frontier and appeared for tea at
the Gallands'. It meant a pleasant half-hour breaking a long walk, a
relief from garrison surroundings. Favored in mind and person, favored
i