ld
be like with the havoc of war raging around him--all self-possession and
mastery; but actually he was trying to reassure himself that he ought
not to feel petulant over a holiday cut short.

"I shall have to go at once," he said. "Marta, if there were to be war
very soon--within a week or two weeks--what would be your attitude about
Feller's remaining?"

"To carry out his plan, you mean?"

"Yes."

There was a perceptible pause on her part.

"Let him stay," she answered. "I shall have time to decide even after
war begins."

"But instantly war begins you must go!" he declared urgently.

"You forget a precedent," she reminded him. "The Galland women have
never deserted the Galland house!"

"I know the precedent. But this time the house will be in the thick of
the fighting."

"It has been in the thick of the fighting before," she said, with a
gesture of impatience.

"Not this kind of fighting, Marta," he proceeded very soberly. "Other
wars are no criterion for this. I know about the defences of the tangent
because I helped to plan them. In order to keep the enemy in ignorance
we have made no permanent fortifications. But the engineers and the
material will be ready, instantly the frontier is closed to
intelligence, to construct defences suited to a delaying and punishing
action. Every human being will be subject to martial law; every resource
at military command. Every hill, house, ditch, and tree will be used as
cover or protection and will be subject to attack."

Not argument this, but the marshalling of facts of the kind in which he
dealt as unanswerable evidence, while she listened with a still face and
dilating eyes that did not look at him until he had finished. Then a
smile came, a faint, drawn smile of irony, and her eyes staring into his
were chilling and greenish-black in their anger.

"And the house of a friend meant nothing! It was only fuel for the hell
you devise!" she said, making each word count like shot singing over
glare ice.

"It is only fair to myself to say that when I laid the sheets of my map
before Partow I had excluded your house and grounds," he pleaded in
defence. "His thumb pounced on that telltale blank space. 'A key-point!
So this is your tendon of Achilles, eh?' he said in his blunt fashion."

"The blunt fashion is admired by soldiers," she replied without
softening. "Yes, he could play chess with heaps of bodies! He is worse
than Westerling!"

"No, he would use his ow