hank you for letting
me live, after you knew."

He saluted and turned away. Marta and Westerling watched him as he
hobbled around the corner of the house and in a heavy silence listened
to the crunch of his crutch tips on the gravel growing fainter. Her
lashes, those convenient curtains for hiding thought, dropped as
Westerling looked around; but he saw that her lips had reddened and that
she was drawing a long, deep, energizing breath. When the lashes lifted,
there was still wonder in her eyes--wonder which had become definite
tribute to him. The assurance he wanted was that he had borne himself
well, and he had it.

"You kept your patience beautifully," she told him. "It seems to me that
you were both kind and wise."

"How I was to be merciful against the facts puzzled me," he replied,
"until you saved the day with your suggestion of psychological
irresponsibility."

"Then I helped? I really helped?"

"You did, decidedly! You--" There he broke off, for he found himself
speaking to her profile.

She had looked away in a sudden flight of abstraction, very far away,
where the lowering sun was stretching the shadows of the foot-hills
toward the white posts. Capes and pillars and promontories of shadow
there in the distance! Swinging, furry finger-points of shadow from the
tall hollyhocks in the garden swaying with the breeze! The dark shade of
the house's mass over the yard!

It was time for him to be at his desk. But she seemed far from any
suggestion of going. She seemed to expect him to wait; otherwise he
might have concluded that she had forgotten his presence. Yet were he to
rustle a paper he knew that she would hear it. Though she did not change
her position in the chair, she appeared subtly active in every fibre.

He found waiting easy, free as he was to watch the beauty of her profile
in the glory of the sunset. The superb thing about her was that she
always called for study. Her lips moved in sensitive turns; her breast
rose in soft billows with her breaths; the long, flickering eyelashes
ran outward from black to bronze and to feather tips of gold. In time
measured by the regular standard of clock ticks, which in the brain may
either race madly or drag mercilessly, she was not long silent. When she
spoke she' did not look entirely around at first; he had no glimpse into
her eyes.

"It was another experience of war," she said moodily, returning to the
subject of Hugo. "Yes, something like the final ch