ty, when his personal aide, a handsome,
boyish, rosy-cheeked young officer, who seemed to be moulded into his
uniform, appeared.

"Your car is waiting, sir," he said. His military correctness could not
hide the admiration and devotion in his eyes. He thought himself the
most fortunate lieutenant in the army. To him Westerling was, indeed,
great. Westerling realized this.

"This is a personal call," Westerling explained; "so you are at liberty
to make one yourself, if you like," he added, with that magnetic smile
of a genial power which he used to draw men to him and hold them.

III

OURS AND THEIRS

On the second terrace, Feller, the Gallands' gardener, a patch of blue
blouse and a patch of broad-brimmed straw hat over a fringe of white
hair, was planting bulbs. Mrs. Galland came down the path from the
veranda loiteringly, pausing to look at the flowers and again at the
sweep of hills and plain. The air was singularly still, so still that
she heard the cries of the children at play in the yards of the
factory-workers' houses which had been steadily creeping up the hill
from the town. She breathed in the peace and beauty of the surroundings
with that deliberate appreciation of age which holds to the happiness in
hand. To-morrow it might rain; to-day it is pleasant. She was getting
old. Serenely she made the most of to-day.

The gardener did not look up when she reached his side. She watched his
fingers firmly pressing the moist earth around the bulbs that he had
sunk in their new beds. There were only three more to set out, and her
inclination, in keeping with her leisureliness, was to wait on the
completion of his task before speaking. Again she let her glance wander
away to the distances. It was arrested and held this time by two groups
of far-away points in the sky along the frontier, in the same bright
light of that other afternoon when Captain Arthur Lanstron had made his
first night over the range.

"Look!" she cried. "Look, look!" she repeated, a girlish excitement
rippling her placidity.

Aeroplanes and dirigibles had become a familiar sight. They were always
going and coming and manoeuvring, the Browns over their territory and
the Grays over theirs. But here was something new: two squadrons of
dirigibles and planes in company, one on either side of the white posts.
For the fraction of a second the dirigibles seemed prisms and the planes
still-winged dragon-flies hung on a blue wall. With the ne