"You do!" Westerling exploded. The plans of the enemy! The plans that neither Bouchard's saturnine cunning, nor bribes, nor spies could ascertain! It was like the bugle-call to the hunter. But he controlled himself. "Yes, yes!" He was thoughtful and guarded.

"Do you think it is right to tell?" Marta gasped half inarticulately.

"Right? Yes, to hasten the inevitable—to save lives!" declared Westerling with deliberate assurance.

"I—I want to see an end of the killing! I—" She sprang to her feet as if about to break away tumultuously, but paused, swaying unsteadily, and passed her hand across her eyes.

"We intend a general attack on the first line of defence to-night!" he exclaimed, his supreme thought leaping into words.

"And you would want the information about the first line to-night if—if it is to be of service?"

"Yes, to-night!"

Marta brought her hands together in a tight clasp. Her gaze fluttered for a minute over the tea-table. When she looked up her eyes were calm.

"It is a big thing, isn't it?" she said. "A thing not to be done in an impulse. I try never to do big things in an impulse. When I see that I am in danger of it I always say: 'Go by yourself and think for half an hour!' So I must now. In a little while I will let you know my decision."

Without further formality she started across the lawn to the terrace steps. Westerling watched her sharply, passing along the path of the second terrace, pacing slowly, head bent, until she was out of sight. Then he stood for a time getting a grip on his own emotions before he went into the house.



XXXIII

IN FELLER'S PLACE

What am I? What have I done? What am I about to do? shot as forked shadows over the hot lava-flow of Malta's impulse. The vitality that Westerling had felt by suggestion from a still profile rejoiced in a quickening of pace directly she was out of sight of the veranda. All the thinking she had done that afternoon had been in pictures; some saying, some cry, some groan, or some smile went with every picture.

Coming to the arbor she slowed down for a step or two, arrested by the recollection of her last meeting with Lanstron. There it was that she had scored him for making her an accomplice of trickery. She saw his twitching hand, and the misery in his eyes and the cadence of his words came as clearly as notes from a violin in a silent chamber to her ears. She nodded in affirmation; she shook her head in negation; she frowned; she laughed strangely, and hurried on.

The sitting-room of the tower was empty to other eyes but not to hers. In imagination she saw Feller standing by the table in the dejection of his heart-break when he faced her and Lanstron, his secret disclosed; and the appeal was more potent in memory than it had been at the time. She went on into the bedroom, which had been formerly the tool-room. On the threshold of the steps into the darkness she glanced back, to see Feller's face transfixed as it had been when he discovered the presence of interlopers—transfixed in fighting rage.

The lantern was in the corner at hand. Only yesterday, in want of occupation, as she thought, she had cleaned the chimney and trimmed the wick. It seemed as if Lanny's fingers were lighting it now; as if he were leading the way as he had on her first visit to the telephone. After her hastening steps had carried her along the tunnel to the telephone, she set down the lantern and pressed the spring that opened the panel door. Another moment and she would be embarked on her great adventure in the finality of action. That little ear-piece became a spectre of conscience. She drew back convulsively and her hands flew to her face; she was a rocking shadow in the thin, reddish light of the lantern.

Conscious mind had torn off the mask from subconscious mind, revealing the true nature of the change that war had wrought in her. She who had resented Feller's part—what a part she had been playing! Every word, every shade of expression, every telling pause of abstraction after Westerling confessed that he had made war for his own ends had been subtly prompted by a purpose whose actuality terrified her.

Her hypocrisy, she realized, was as black as the wall of darkness beyond the lantern's gleam. All her pictures became a whirling involution of extravaganza and all the speeches of the characters of the scenes a kind of wail. Then this demoralization passed, as a nightmare passes, with Westerling's boast again in her ears. She was seeing Hugo Mallin; hearing him announce his principles in sight of the spot where Dellarme had died:

"I love my country.... But I know that other men love theirs.... Men should be brave for their convictions.... The Browns are fighting for their homes.... They are fighting, as I should want to fight, against murder and burglary.... I will fight with my face to the white posts, but not with my back to them."

She was seeing the faces of her children; she was hearing them repeat:

"But I shall not let a burglar drive me from my house. If an enemy tries to take my land I shall appeal to his sense of justice and reason with him; but if he then persists I shall fight for my home."

When war's principles, enacted by men, were based on sinister trickery called strategy and tactics, should not women, using such weapons as they had, also fight for their homes? Marta's hands swept down from her eyes; she was on fire with resolution.

Forty miles away a bell in Lanstron's bedroom and at his desk rang simultaneously. At the time he and Partow were seated facing each other across a map on the table of the room where they worked together. No persuasion of the young vice-chief, no edict of the doctors, could make the old chief take exercise or shorten his hours.

"I know. I know myself!" he said. "I know my duty. And you are learning, my boy, learning!"

Every day the flabby cheeks grew pastier and the pouches under the eyebrows heavier. But there was no dimming of the eagle flashes of the eyes, no weakening of the will. Last night Lanstron had turned as white as chalk when Partow staggered on rising from the table, the veins on his temples knotted blue whip-cords. Yet after a few hours' sleep he reappeared with firm step, fresh for the fray.

The paraphernalia around these two was the same as that around Westerling. Only the atmosphere of the staff was different. It had a quality of sober and buoyant alertness and fatality of determination rather than rigid confidence. Otherwise, there was the same medley of typewriters and telegraph instruments, the same types of busy officers and clerks that occupied the Galland house. To them, at least, war had brought no surprises. Its routine was as they had anticipated it there in the big division headquarters building, dissociated from the actual experience of the intimate emotions of the front. Each man was performing the part set for him. No man knew much of any other man's part. Partow alone knew all, and Lanstron was trying to grasp all and praying that Partow's old body should still feed his mind with energy. Lanstron was thinner and paler, a new and glittering intensity in his eyes.

A messenger had just brought in two despatches from the telegraph room. One was from the taciturn press bureau of the Grays which flashed into the Browns' headquarters from a neutral country at the same time that it flashed around the world to illumine bulletin-boards in every language of civilization. Day after day the Grays had announced the occupation of fresh positions. This was the only news that they had permitted egress—the news which read like the march of victory to the eager world of the press, hastening to quick conclusions. To-day came the official word that Westerling had established his headquarters on conquered territory. Proof, this, that five could drive back three; that the weak could not resist the strong!

"Hm-m—indeed!" exclaimed Partow, lifting his brow into massive, corrugated wrinkles. "It may affect the stock market, but not the result."

The other despatch was also out of the land of the Grays, but not by Westerling's consent or knowledge. By devious ways it had broken through the censorship of the frontier in cunning cipher. It told of artillery concentrations three days old; it told only what the aeroplanes had already seen; it told what the Grays had done but nothing of what they intended to do.

When word of Feller's defection came, Lanstron realized for the first time by Partow's manner that the old chief of staff, with all his deprecation of the telephone scheme as chimerical, had grounded a hope on it.

"There was the chance that we might know—so vital to the defence—what they were going to do before and not after the attack," he said.

Yet the story of how Feller yielded to the temptation of the automatic had made the nostrils of the old war-horse quiver with a dramatic breath, and instead of the command of a battery of guns, which Lanstron had promised, the chief made it a battalion. He had drawn down his brows when he heard that Marta had asked that the wire be left intact; he had shot a shrewd, questioning glance at Lanstron and then beat a tattoo on the table and half grinned as he grumbled under his breath:

"She is afraid of being lonesome! No harm done!" A week had passed since the Grays had taken the Galland house, and still no word from Marta. The ring of the bell brought Lanstron to his feet with a startled, boyish bound.

"Very springy, that tendon of Achilles!" muttered Partow. "And, my boy, take care, take care!" he called suddenly in his sonorous voice, as vast and billowy as his body. "Take care! She might unwittingly repeat something you said—and hold on!" He was amazingly light and vigorous on his feet as he rose and hurried after Lanstron with the quick, short steps of active adiposity. "She may have seen or heard something. Ask—ask what is the spirit of the staff, of the soldiers who have fought? What is the truth about their losses? What—" He broke off at the door of Lanstron's bedroom. Lanstron had flung aside a bathrobe that covered a panel door in the closet and already had the receiver in his hand. "But you know what to ask!" concluded Partow. A flush of embarrassment crept into the pasty cheeks and a sparkle into his fine old eyes as he withdrew to acquit himself of being an eavesdropper.

It was Marta's voice and yet not Marta's, this voice that beat in nervous waves over the wire.

"Lanny—yes, I, Lanny! You were right. Westerling planned to make war deliberately to satisfy his ambition. He told me so. The first general attack on the first line of defence is to-night. Westerling says so!" She had to pause for breath. "And, Lanny, I want to know some position of the Browns which is weak—not actually weak, maybe, but some position where the Grays expect terrible resistance and will not find it—where you will let them in!"

"In the name of—Marta! Marta, what—"

"I am going to fight for the Browns—for my home!"

In the sheer satisfaction of explaining herself to herself, of voicing her sentiments, she sent the pictures which had wrought the change moving across the screen before Lanstron's amazed vision. There was no room for interruption on his part, no question or need of one. The wire seemed to quiver with the militant tension of her spirit. It was Marta aflame who was talking at the other end; not aflame for him, but with a purpose that revealed all the latent strength of her personality and daring.

"Yes, the only way is to fight for your home," she concluded. "Otherwise, the world would be to the bully and the heads of saints and philosophers and teachers would be egg-shells under his bludgeon."

"It seems," said Lanstron, "that this is almost like my own view."

He was sorry before the words were fairly out of his mouth that he had taken that tack. It was asking her to back down abruptly from her old principles, which only the weak proselyte will do readily; and she was not a proselyte at all, to her conception.

"No, no!" She etched her reply into his mind with acid, "My profession is peace; it is not war. I am caught with my back to the wall. If the Browns lose, the Gray flag floats over my home. As Westerling says, everybody must take orders from the Grays then. Oh, the mockery of his repairing the damage done to our house and grounds! Let him repair the damage done to fathers and mothers by bringing their sons sacrificed to the ambition for conquest back to life! Oh, I got the whole of him reflected in the mirror of himself this afternoon when he was comfortably taking tea, and in no danger, and sending men to death!"

There Lanstron winced over a characterization that might apply to him. He could think of only one thing that would ever heal the wound. Perhaps the chance for it would come some day.

"Yes," she went on, "sitting there so comfortably and serenely and deciding that a man who was ready to die for his convictions must be shot for cowardice! My views are like Hugo Mallin's and my back is against the wall. But to the work, Lanny! I have a half-hour in which to make up my mind"—she laughed curiously as she repeated the phrase—"in which to make up my mind." Briefly she recounted what about: "I want to give him positive information of a weak point that can be taken easily."

"But, Marta—Marta—have you considered what a terrible risk—what—" he protested, the chief of intelligence now submerged in the man.

"No more than for Feller. I sent Feller away and I am taking his place. How is he? Did he get his guns?"

"Yes, not a battery, but a battalion—a major's command—and the iron cross, too!"

"Splendid! Oh, I'd like to see him in uniform directing their fire! How happy he must be! But, are you going to do your part? Are you going to give me the information?"

"I shall have to ask Partow. It's a pretty big thing."

"Yes—only that is not all my plan, my little plan. After they have taken the first line of defence—and they will get it, won't they?"

"Yes, we shall yield in the end, yield rather than suffer too great losses there that will weaken the defence on the main line."

"Then I want to know where it is that you want Westerling to attack on the main line, so that we can get him to attack there. That—that will help, won't it?"

"Yes."

"Of course, all the while I shall be getting news from him—when I have proven my loyalty and have his complete confidence—and I'll telephone it to you. I am sure I can get something worth while with you to direct me; don't you think so, Lanny?"

She put the question as simply as if she were asking if she might sew on a button for him. It had the charm of an intimate fellowship of purpose. It appeared free of the least realization of the magnitude of her undertaking. Didn't Mrs. Galland believe that blood would tell? And hadn't the old premier, her grandfather, said: "You can afford to be fussed about little things but never about big things"?

"I'll hold the wire, Lanny. Ask Partow!" she concluded. Of the two she was the steadier.

"Well?" said Partow, looking up at the sound of Lanstron's step. Then he half raised himself from his chair at sight of a Lanstron with eyes in a daze of brilliancy; a Lanstron with his maimed hand twitching in an outstretched gesture; a Lanstron in the dilemma of being at the same time lover and chief of intelligence. Should he let her make the sacrifice of everything that he held to be sacred to a woman's delicacy? Should he not return to the telephone and tell her that he would not permit her to play such a part? Partow's voice cut in on his demoralization with the sharpness of a blade.

"Well, what, man, what?" he demanded. He feared that the girl might be dead. Anything that could upset Lanstron in this fashion struck a chord of sympathy and apprehension.

Lanstron advanced to the table, pressed his hands on the edge, and, now master of himself, began an account of Marta's offer. Partow's formless arms lay inert on the table, his soft, pudgy fingers outspread on the map and his bulk settled deep in the chair, while his eagle eyes were seeing through Lanstron, through a mountain range, into the eyes of a woman and a general on the veranda of an enemy's headquarters. The plan meant giving, giving in the hope of receiving much in return. Would he get the return?

"A woman was the ideal one for the task we intrusted to Feller," he mused, "a gentlewoman, big enough, adroit enough, with her soul in the work as no paid woman's could be! There seemed no such one in the world!"

"But to let her do it!" gasped Lanstron.

"It is her suggestion, not yours? She offers herself? She wants no persuasion?" Partow asked sharply.

"Entirely her suggestion," said Lanstron. "She offers herself for her country—for the cause for which our soldiers will give their lives by the thousands. It is a time of sacrifice."

Partow raised his arms. They were not formless as he brought them down with sledge-hammer force to the table.

"Your tendon of Achilles? My boy, she is your sword-arm!" His sturdy forefinger ran along the line of frontier under his eye with little staccato leaps. "Eh?" he chuckled significantly, finger poised.

"Let them up the Bordir road and on to redoubts 36 and 37, you mean?" asked Lanstron.

"You have it! The position looks important, but so well do we command it that it is not really vital. Yes, the Bordir road is her bait for Westerling!" Partow waved his hand as if the affair were settled.

"But," interjected Lanstron, "we have also to decide on the point of the main defence which she is to make Westerling think is weak."

"Hm-m!" grumbled Partow. "That is not necessary to start with. We can give that to her later over the telephone, can't we, eh?"

"She asked for it now."

"Why?" demanded Partow with one of his shrewd, piercing looks.

"She did not say, but I can guess," explained Lanstron. "She must put all her cards on the table; she must tell Westerling all she knows at once. If she tells him piecemeal it might lead to the supposition that she still had some means of communication with the Browns."

"Of course, of course!" Partow spatted the flat of his hand resoundingly on the map. "As I decided the first time I met her, she has a head, and when a woman has a head for that sort of thing there is no beating her. Well—" he was looking straight into Lanstron's eyes, "well, I think we know the point where we could draw them in on the main line, eh?"

"Up the apron of the approach from the Engadir valley. We yield the advance redoubts on either side."

"Meanwhile, we have massed heavily behind the redoubt. We retake the advance redoubts in a counter-attack and—" Partow brought his fist into his palm with a smack.

"Yes, if we could do that! If we could get them to expend their attack there!" put in Lanstron very excitedly for him.

"We must! She shall help!" Partow was on his feet. He had reached across the table and seized Lanstron's shoulders in a powerful if flesh-padded grip. Then he turned Lanstron around toward the door of his bedroom and gave him a mighty slap of affection. "My boy, the brightest hope of victory we have is holding the wire for you. Tell her that a bearded old behemoth, who can kneel as gracefully as a rheumatic rhinoceros, is on both knees at her feet, kissing her hands and trying his best, in the name of mercy, to keep from breaking into verse of his own composition."

Back at the telephone, Lanstron, in the fervor of the cheer and the enthusiasm that had transported his chief, gave Marta Partow's message.

"You, Marta, are our brightest hope of victory!"

"Yes?" The monosyllable was detached, dismal, labored. "A woman can be that!" she exclaimed in an uncertain tone, which grew into the distraction of clipped words and broken sentences. "A woman play-acting—a woman acting the most revolting hypocrisy—influences the issue between two nations! Her deceit deals in the lives of sons precious to fathers and mothers, the fate of frontiers, of institutions! Think of it! Think of machines costing countless millions—machines of flesh and blood, with their destinies shaped by one little bit of lying information! Think of the folly of any civilization that stakes its triumphs on such a gamble! Am I not right? Isn't it true? Isn't it?"

"Yes, yes, Marta! But—I—" If she were weakening it was not his place to try to strengthen her purpose.

"I was thinking, only thinking!" she murmured reflectively. "That's not the thing now!" she added with sudden force. "Partow gave you the positions?"

He described the Bordir position. She repeated the description after him with a stoical matter-of-factness to make sure that she had it correctly.

"I must actually know in order to be convincing," she said. "Now that of the main line."

He did not include in the description of Engadir any reference to the Browns' plan of a crushing counter-attack. But as she was repeating this, her calm tone broke into an outcry of horror, as the nature of what he was inadvertently concealing flashed into her mind. She was seeing another picture of imagination, with all the hideous detail of realism drawn from her week's experiences.

"That column of Grays will go forward cheering with victory, led on, tricked on—and then they will find themselves in a shambles. No going forward, no going back through the cross-fire! Is that it?"

"Yes, something like that, though not exactly a cross-fire—not unless the enemy has poorer generals than we think."

"But that will be the object and the effect—wholesale slaughter?"

"Yes!" assented Lanstron honestly.

"And a woman whose greatest happiness and pride was in teaching the righteousness and the beauty of peace to children—her lie will send them to death!" she moaned. "I shall be a party to murder!"

"No more than Westerling! No more than any general! No—" But he paused in his argument. Conviction must come to her from within, not from without. He stood graven and wordless, while she was tortured in the hell of her mind's creation.

She was hearing the cry in the night of the Gray soldier who had fallen from the dirigible in the first day's fighting; the agonized groans of the men under the wall of the terrace when the hand-grenades spattered human flesh as if it were jelly. But there was Dellarme smiling; there was Hugo Mallin saying that he would fight for his own home; there was Stransky, who had thrown the hand-grenade, bringing in an exhausted old man on his back from under fire; there was Feller as he rallied Dellarme's men; and—and there was Lanny waiting at the other end of the wire—and a burglar should not take her home.

"Men must have the courage of their convictions!" Hugo had said. Hers were all for peace. But there was not peace. There could not be peace until the war demon had had his fill of killing and one side had to cry for mercy. Which side should that be? That was the only question.

"It will the sooner end fighting, won't it, Lanny?" she asked in a small, tense voice.

"Yes."

"And the only real end that means real peace is to prove that the weak can hold back the strong from their threshold?"

"Yes."

Even now Westerling might be on the veranda, perhaps waiting for news that would enable him to crush the weak; to prove that the law of five pounds of human flesh against three, and five bayonets against three, is the law of civilization.

"Yes, yes, yes!" The constriction was gone from her throat; there was a drum-beat in her soul. "Depend on me, Lanny!" It was Feller's favorite phrase spoken by the one who was to take his place. "Yes, I'm ready to make any sacrifice now. For what am I? What is one woman compared to such a purpose? I don't care what is said of me or what becomes of me if we can win! Good-by, Lanny, till I call you up again! And God with us!"

"God with us!" as Partow had said, over and over The saying had come to be repeated by hard-headed, agnostic staff-officers, who believed that the deity had no relation to the efficiency of gun-fire. The Brown infantrymen even were beginning to mutter it in the midst of action.



XXXIV

THREE VOICES

Waiting on the path of the second terrace for Westerling to come, Marta realized the full meaning of her task. Day in and day out she was to have suspense at her elbow and the horror of hypocrisy on her conscience, the while keeping her wits nicely balanced. She must feel her part and at the same time she must be sufficiently conscious that she was placing a part not to let any impulse of aversion betray her. The tea-table scene had been a rehearsal; coming was a premiere before the ghostly, still faces across the bent glare of the footlights. No ready-made lines, hers She must create them. Every word must be the right word and spoken in the right way, all for the deception of one man.

When she saw Westerling appear on the veranda and start over the lawn she felt dizzy and uncertain of her capabilities. In the gathering dusk he seemed of giant stature, too masterful to be outwitted by any trickery she might devise. She wondered if she would be able to articulate a word; if she would not turn and flee.

"I have considered all that you said for my guidance and I have decided," she began.

Marta heard her own voice with the relief of a singer in a debut who, with knees shaking, finds that her notes are true. She was looking directly at Westerling in profound seriousness. Though knees shook, lips and chin could aid eyes in revealing the painful fatigue of a battle that had raged in the mind of a woman who went away for half an hour to think for herself.

"I have concluded," she went on, "that it is an occasion for the sacrifice of private ethics to a great purpose, the sooner to end the slaughter."

"All true!" whispered an inner voice. Its tone was Lanny's, in the old days of their comradeship. It gave her strength. All true!

"Yes, an end—a speedy end!" said Westerling with a fine, inflexible emphasis. "That is your prayer and mine and the prayer of all lovers of humanity."

"He is not thinking of humanity, but of individual victory!" whispered another voice, which had the mellow tone of Hugo Mallin's deliberate wisdom.

"It is little that I know, but such as it is you shall have it," she began, conscious of his guarded scrutiny. When she told him of Bordir, the weak point in the first line of the Browns' defence, she noted no change in his steady look; but with the mention of Engadir in the main line she detected a gleam in his eyes that had the merciless delight of a cutting edge of steel. "I have made my sacrifice to some purpose? The information is worth something to you?" she asked wistfully.

"Yes, yes! Yes, it promises that way," he replied thoughtfully.

Quietly he began a considerate catechism. Soon she was subtly understanding that her answers lacked the convincing details that he sought. She longed to avert her eyes from his for an instant, but she knew that this would be fatal. She felt the force of him directed in professional channels, free of all personal relations, beating as a strong light on her bare statements. How could a woman ever have learned two such vital secrets? How could it happen that two such critical points as Bordir and Engadir should go undefended? No tactician, no engineer but would have realized their strategic importance. Did she know what she was saying? How did she get her knowledge? These, she understood, were the real questions that underlay Westerling's polite indirection.

"Invention! Quick, quick! How did you find out? Quick and naturally and obviously—pure invention; no half-way business!" whispered still another voice, the voice of that most facile of story-builders, Feller, this time.

"But I have not told you the sources of my information! Isn't that like a woman!" she exclaimed. "You see, it did not concern me at all at the time I heard it. I didn't even realize its importance and I didn't hear much," she proceeded, her introduction giving time for improvisation. "You see, Partow was inspecting the premises with Colonel Lanstron. My mother had known Partow in her younger days when my grandfather was premier. We had them both to luncheon."

"Yes?" put in Westerling, betraying his eagerness. Partow and Lanstron! Then her source was one of authority, not the gossip of subalterns!

"And it occurs to me now that, even while he was our guest," she interjected in sudden indignation—"that even while he was our guest Partow was planning to make our grounds a redoubt!"

"Bully! Very feminine and convincing!" whispered the voice of Feller.

"After luncheon I remember Partow saying, 'We are going to have a look at the crops,' and they went for a walk out to the knoll where the fighting began."

"Yes! When was this?" Westerling asked keenly.

"Only about six weeks ago," answered Marta.

"That's it! That's splendid! If you'd said a year ago there would have been time enough in the meanwhile to fortify!" whispered the voice of Feller encouragingly. "You're going fine! Keep it up!"

"Later, I came upon them unexpectedly after they had returned," Marta went on. "They were sitting there on that seat concealed by the shrubbery. I was on the terrace steps unobserved and I couldn't help overhearing them. Their voices grew louder with the interest of their discussion. I caught something about appropriations and aeroplanes and Bordir and Engadir, and saw that Lanstron was pleading with his chief. He wanted a sum appropriated for fortifications to be applied to building planes and dirigibles. Finally, Partow consented, and I recall his exact words: 'They're shockingly archaically defended, especially Engadir,' he said, 'but they can wait until we get further appropriations in the fall.'" She was so far under the spell of her own invention that she believed the reality of her words, reflected in her wide-open eyes which seemed to have nothing to hide.

"That is all," she exclaimed with a shudder—"all my eavesdropping, all my breach of confidence! If—if it—" and her voice trembled with the intensity of the one purpose that was shining with the light of truth through the murk of her deception—"it will only help to end the slaughter!" She held out her hand convulsively in parting as if she would leave the rest with him.

"I think it will," he said soberly. "I think it will prove that you have done a great service," he repeated as he caught both her hands, which were cold from her ordeal. His own were warm with the strong beating of his heart stirred by the promise of what he had just heard. But he did not prolong the grasp. He was as eager to be away to his work as she to be alone. "I think it will. You will know in the morning," he added.

His steps were sturdier than ever in the power of five against three as he started back to the house. When he reached the veranda, Bouchard, the saturnine chief of intelligence, appeared in the doorway of the dining-room: or, rather, reappeared, for he had been standing there throughout the interview of Westerling and Marta, whose heads were just visible, above the terrace wall, to his hawk eyes.

"A little promenade in the open and my mind made up," said Westerling, clapping Bouchard on the shoulder.

"Something about an attack to-night?" asked Bouchard.

"You guess right. Call the others."

Five minutes later he was seated at the head of the dining-room table with his chiefs around him waiting for their chairman to speak. He asked some categorical questions almost perfunctorily, and the answer to each was, "Ready!" with, in some instances, a qualification—the qualification made by regimental and brigade commanders that, though they could take the position in front of them, the cost would be heavy. Yes, all were willing and ready for the first general assault of the war, but they wanted to state the costs as a matter of professional self-defence.

Westerling could pose when it served his purpose. Now he rose and, going to one of the wall maps, indicated a point with his forefinger.

"If we get that we have the most vital position, haven't we?"

Some uttered a word of assent; some only nodded. A glance or two of curiosity was exchanged. Why should the chief of staff ask so elementary a question? Westerling was not unconscious of the glances or of their meaning. They gave dramatic value to his next remark.

"We are going to mass for our main attack in front at Bordir!"

"But," exclaimed four or five officers at once, "that is the heart of the position! That is—"

"I believe it is weak—that it will fall, and to-night!"

"You have information, then, information that I have not?" asked Bouchard.

"No more than you," replied Westerling. "Not as much if you have anything new."

"Nothing!" admitted Bouchard wryly. He lowered his head under Westerling's penetrating look in the consciousness of failure.

"I am going on a conviction—on putting two and two together!" Westerling announced. "I am going on my experience as a soldier, as a chief of staff. If I am wrong, I take the responsibility. If I am right, Bordir will be ours before morning. It is settled!"

"If you are right, then," exclaimed Turcas—"well, then it's genius or—" He did not finish the sentence. He had been about to say coincidence; while Westerling knew that if he were right all the rising scepticism in certain quarters, owing to the delay in his programme, would be silenced. His prestige would be unassailable.



XXXV

MRS. GALLAND INSISTS

"You have been in the tunnel again!" said Mrs. Galland with an emphasis on "again," when Marta came up the stairs, lantern in hand, after telling Lanstron of her interview with Westerling.

"Again—yes!" Marta replied mechanically. Her mind was empty, burned out. She had thought herself through with deceit for the day.

"What interests you so much down there?" Mrs. Galland pursued softly.

Marta realized that she had to deal with a fresh dilemma. She could not be making frequent visits to the telephone without her mother's knowledge; and, as yet, Mrs. Galland knew nothing of the part originally planned for Feller, let alone any inkling of her daughter's part.

"I didn't know but it would be a good place to hide our plate and other treasures," said Marta, offering rather methodically the first invention that came to mind as she threw open-the reflector of the lantern and turned down the wick. She was ashamed of the excuse. It warned her how easy it was becoming for her to lie—yes, lie was the word.

"Don't blow out the light, please," said Mrs. Galland. "I should like to see for myself if the tunnel is a good hiding-place for the plate."

"It's too damp for you down there—it's—" Marta blew out the flame with a sudden gust of breath and bolted across the room and into her chamber, closing the door and taking the lantern with her. In utter fatigue she dropped on the bed. Then came a gentle, prolonged knocking on the door.

"You forgot to leave the lantern," called Mrs. Galland. "I have come to get it, if you please."

Marta did not answer. Her head had sunk forward; her hands, bearing the weight of her body, were resting on her knees. All she could think was that one more lie would break the camel's back.

"Marta, please mayn't I come in?" rose the gentle voice on the other side of the door. "Marta, don't you hear me? I asked if I might come in."

"It's too childish and silly to remain silent any longer," thought Marta. Tired nerves revived spasmodically under another call to action. "Yes, certainly, mother—yes, do!" she said in a forced, metallic tone.

Mrs. Galland entered to find her daughter before the mirror brushing her hair with hectic vigor. She did not take up the lantern, which Marta had left in the middle of the floor, but seated herself. Her nice deliberation in smoothing out a wrinkle of her skirt over her knees indicated that she meant to stay a while. She folded her plump, white hands; a faint touch of color came into her round, pink cheeks; a trace of a smile knitted itself into the corners of her mouth. She was as she had been—J'y suis! J'y reste!—when the captain of engineers had pleaded with her at the outset of the war to leave the house. In the reflection of the mirror Marta's glance caught hers, which was without reproach or complaint, but very resolute.

"Do you like best to keep it all to yourself, Marta?" Mrs. Galland inquired solicitously.

"What? Keep what?" asked Marta crossly.

"Even if you have been all the way around the world, it might be easier if you allowed me to help you a little," pursued Mrs. Galland.

"Help! Help about what?" said Marta.

That reply, as Marta knew now as an expert in deceit, was a mistake. She was hedging and petulant when she ought to have whirled around gayly and kissed her mother on the cheek, while laughing at such solemnity over a trip of exploration through the tunnel. Mrs. Galland had caught her prevaricating. Not since Marta was a little girl of seven had she "fibbed" to her mother; and on that memorable and ethically instructive occasion her mother had regarded her in this same calm fashion.

"At all events," said Mrs. Galland, "I could help you a little if you would let me comb your hair. You are combing in a most unsystematic way, I must say. Systematic, gentle combing is very good for headaches and—"

There was a twinkle in Mrs. Galland's eye that was not exactly humor; a persistent twinkle that seemed to shine out of every part of the mirror. Her curiosity had come to stay; there was no escaping it. Marta brought her brush down with a bang on the bureau, only to be disgusted with this show of temper which the persistent twinkle had not missed. Her next impulse, unanalyzed because it was one of the oldest and simplest of impulses, made her spin round and drop on her knees at her mother's feet, which was just what had happened when she had started to brave out the last lie—the childhood lie.

Her head buried in her mother's lap, she was sobbing. It was many years since Mrs. Galland had known Marta to sob and she was glad that Marta had not forgotten how. She believed in the value of the law of overflow. When Marta looked up with eyes still moist, it was with the joyous satisfaction that begins a confession. Not once during the recital did the smile fade from Mrs. Galland's lips. She was too well fortified for any kind of a shock to exhibit surprise.

"You see, I could not tell you—I—" Marta concluded, still uncertain what conclusion lay behind her mother's attitude.

"Of course you could not," said Mrs. Galland. "As grandfather—my father, the premier—said; a man action cannot stop to explain everything he does. He must strike while the iron is hot. If you had stopped to discuss every step you would not have gone far—Yes, I should have argued and protested. It was best that I, being as I am—that I should not have been told—not until now."

"And I must go on!" added Marta.

"Of course you must!" replied Mrs. Galland. "You must for the sake of the Browns—the flag your father and grandfather served. They would not have approved of petty deceit, but anything for the cause, any sacrifices, any immolation of self and personal sensibilities. Yes, your father would have been happy, though he had no son, to know that his daughter might do such a service. And we must tell Minna," she added.

"Minna! You think so? Every added link may mean weakness."

"But Minna will see you going and coming from the tunnel, too. She is for the Browns with all her heart. They are her people and, besides," Mrs. Galland smiled rather broadly, "that giant Stransky is with the Browns!" So Minna was told.

"I'd like to kiss your skirt, Miss Galland!" exclaimed Minna in admiration.

"Better kiss me!" said Marta, throwing her arms around the girl. "We must stand together and think together in any emergency."

Soon after dark the attack began. Flashes of bursting shells and flashes from gun mouths and glowing sheets of flame from rifles made ugly revelry, while the beams of search-lights swept hither and thither. This kept up till shortly after midnight, when it died down and, where hell's concert had raged, silent darkness shrouded the hills. Marta knew that Bordir was taken without having to ask Lanstron or wait for confirmation from Westerling.

She was seated in the recess of the arbor the next morning, when she heard the approach of those regular, powerful steps whose character had become as distinct to her as those of a member of her own family. Five Against three! five against three! they were saying to her; while down the pass road and the castle road ran the stream of wounded from last night's slaughter.

Posted in the drawing-room of the Galland house were the congratulations of the premier to Westerling, who had come from the atmosphere of a staff that accorded to him a military insight far above the analysis of ordinary standards. But he was too clever a man to vaunt his triumph. He knew how to carry his honors. He accepted success as his due, in a matter-of-course manner that must inspire confidence in further success.

"You were right," he said to Marta easily, pleasantly. "We did it—we did it—we took Bordir with a loss of only twenty thousand men!"

Only twenty thousand! Her revulsion at the bald statement was relieved by the memory of Lanny's word over the telephone after breakfast that the Browns had lost only five thousand. Four to one was a wide ratio, she was thinking.

"Then the end—then peace is so much the nearer?" she asked.

"Very much nearer!" he answered earnestly, as he dropped on the bench beside her.

He stretched his arms out on the back of the seat and the relaxed attitude, unusual with him, brought into relief a new trait of which she had been hitherto oblivious. The conqueror had become simply a companionable man. Though he was not sitting close to her, yet, as his eyes met hers, she had a desire to move away which she knew would be unwise to gratify. She was conscious of a certain softening charm, a magnetism that she had sometimes felt in the days when she first knew him. She realized, too, that then the charm had not been mixed with the indescribable, intimate quality that it held now.

"In the midst of congratulations after the position was taken last night," he declared, "I confess that I was thinking less of success than of its source." He bent on her a look that was warm with gratitude.

She lowered her lashes before it; before gratitude that made her part appear in a fresh angle of misery.

"There seems to be a kind of fatality about our relations," he went on. "I lay awake pondering it last night." His tone held more than gratitude. It had the elation of discovery.

"Look out! Look out, now!" Not only the voices of Lanny and Feller and Hugo warned her, but also those of her mother and Minna.

"He is going to make it harder than I ever guessed!" echoed her own thought, in a flutter of confusion.

"Yes, it was strange our meeting on the frontier in peace and then in war!" she exclaimed at random. The sound of the remark struck her as too subdued; as expectant, when her purpose was one of careless deprecation.

"I have met a great many women, as you may have imagined," he proceeded. "They passed in review. They were simply women, witty and frail or dull and beautiful, and one meant no more to me than another. Nothing meant anything to me except my profession. But I never forgot you. You planted something in mind: a memory of real companionship."

"Yes, I made the prophecy that came true!" she put in. This ought to bring him back to himself and his ambitions, she thought.

"Yes!" he exclaimed, his body stiffening free of the back of the seat. "You realized what was in me. You foresaw the power which was to be mine. The fate that first brought us together made me look you up in the capital. Now it brings us together here on this bench after all that has passed in the last twenty-four hours."

She realized that he had drawn perceptibly nearer. She wanted to rise and cry out: "Don't do this! Be the chief of staff, the conqueror, crushing the earth with the tread of five against three!" It was the conqueror whom she wanted to trick, not a man whose earnestness was painting her deceit blacker. Far from rising, she made no movement at all; only looked at her hands and allowed him to go on, conscious of the force of a personality that mastered men and armies now warm and appealing in the full tide of another purpose.

"The victory that I was thinking of last night was not the taking of Bordir. It was finer than any victory in war. It was selfish—not for army and country, but born of a human weakness triumphant; a human weakness of which my career had robbed me," he continued. "It gave me a joy that even the occupation of the Browns' capital could not give. I had come as an invader and I had won your confidence."

"In a cause!" she interrupted hurriedly, wildly, to stop him from going further, only to find that her intonation was such that it was drawing him on.

"That fatality seemed to be working itself out to the soldier so much older than yourself in renewed youth, in another form of ambition. I hoped that there was more than the cause that led you to trust me. I hoped—"

Was he testing her? Was he playing a part of his own to make certain that she was not playing one? She looked up swiftly for answer. There was no gainsaying what she saw in his eyes. It was beating into hers with the power of an overwhelming masculine passion and a maturity of intellect as his egoism admitted a comrade to its throne. Such is ever the way of the man in the forties when the clock strikes for him. But who could know better the craft of courtship than one of Westerling's experience? He was fighting for victory; to gratify a desire.

"I did not expect this—I—" The words escaped tumultuously and chokingly.

She heard all the voices in chorus: "Look out! Look out!" And then the voice of Feller alone, insinuating, with a sinister mischievousness: "What more could you ask? Now that you have him, hold him! For God and country—for our dear Brown land!"

Hold a man who was making love to her by the tricks of the courtesan! But what kind of love? He was bending so close to her that she felt his breath on her cheek burning hot, and she was sickeningly conscious that he was looking her over in that point-by-point manner which she had felt across the tea-table at the hotel. This horrible thing in his glance she had sometimes seen in strangers on her travels, and it had made her think that she was wise to carry a little revolver. She wanted to strike him.

"Confess! Confess!" called all her own self-respect. "Make an end to your abasement!"

"Confession, after the Browns have given up Bordir! Confession that makes Lanny, not Westerling, your dupe!" came the reply, which might have been telegraphed into her mind from the high, white forehead of Partow bending over his maps. "Confession, betraying the cause of the right against the wrong; the three to the conquering five! No! You are in the things. You may not retreat now."

For a few seconds only the duel of argument thundered in her temples—seconds in which her lips were parted and quivering and her eyes dilated with an agitation which the man at her side could interpret as he pleased. A prompting devil—a devil roused by that thing in his eyes—urging a finesse in double-dealing which only devils understand, made her lips hypnotically turn in a smile, her eyes soften, and sent her hand out to Westerling in a trance-like gesture. For an instant it rested on his arm with telling pressure, though she felt it burn with shame at the point of contact.

"We must not think of that now," she said. "We must think of nothing personal; of nothing but your work until your work is done!"

The prompting devil had not permitted a false note in her voice. Her very pallor, in fixity of idea, served her purpose. Westerling drew a deep breath that seemed to expand his whole being with greater appreciation of her. Yet that harried hunger, the hunger of a beast, was still in his glance.

"This is like you—like what I want you to be!" he said. "You are right." He caught her hand, enclosing it entirely in his grip, and she was sensible, in a kind of dazed horror, of the thrill of his strength. "Nothing can stop us! Numbers will win! Hard fighting in the mercy of a quick end!" he declared with his old rigidity of five against three which was welcome to her. "Then," he added—"and then—"

"Then!" she repeated, averting her glance. "Then—" There the devil ended the sentence and she withdrew her hand and felt the relief of one escaping suffocation, to find that he had realized that anything further during that interview would be banality and was rising to go.

"I don't feel decent!" she thought. "Society turned on Minna for a human weakness—but I—I'm not a human being! I am one of the pawns of the machine of war!"

Walking slowly with lowered head as she left the arbor, she almost ran into Bouchard, who apologized with the single word "Pardon!" as he lifted his cap in overdone courtesy, which his stolid brevity made the more conspicuous.

"Miss Galland, you seem lost in abstraction," he said in sudden loquacity. "I am almost on the point of accusing you of being a poet."

"Accusing!" she replied. "Then you must think that I would write bad poetry."

"On the contrary, I should say excellent—using the sonnet form," he returned.

"I might make a counter accusation, only that yours would be the epic form," answered Marta. "For you, too, seem fond of rambling."

There was a veiled challenge in the hawk eyes, which she met with commonplace politeness in hers, before he again lifted his cap and proceeded on his way.



XXXVI

MARKING TIME

For the next two weeks Marta's role resolved itself into a kind of routine. Their cramped quarters became spacious to the three women in the intimacy of the common secret shared by them under the very nose of the staff. With little Clarissa Eileen, they formed the only feminine society in the neighborhood. On sunshiny days Mrs. Galland was usually to be found in her favorite chair outside the tower door; and here Minna set the urn on a table at four-thirty as in the old days.

No member of the staff was more frequently present at Marta's teas than Bouchard, who was developing his social instinct late in life by sitting in the background and allowing others to do the talking while he watched and listened. In his hearing, Marta's attitude toward the progress of the war was sympathetic but never interrogatory, while she shared attention with Clarissa Eileen, who was in danger of becoming spoiled by officers who had children of their own at home. After the reports of killed and wounded, which came with such appalling regularity, it was a relief to hear of the day's casualties among Clarissa's dolls. The chief of transportation and supply rode her on his shoulder; the chief of tactics played hide-and-seek with her; the chief engineer built her a doll house of stones with his own hands; and the chief medical officer was as concerned when she caught a cold as if the health of the army were at stake.

"We mustn't get too set up over all this attention, Clarissa Eileen, my rival," said Marta to the child. "You are the only little girl and I am the only big girl within reach. If there were lots of others it would be different."

She had occasional glimpses of Hugo Mallin on his crutches, keeping in the vicinity of the shrubbery that screened the stable from the house. How Marta longed to talk with him! But he was always attended by a soldier, and under the rigorous discipline that held all her impulses subservient to her purpose she passed by him without a word lest she compromise her position.

Bouchard was losing flesh; his eyes were sinking deeper under a heavier frown. His duty being to get information, he was gaining none. His duty being to keep the Grays' secrets, there was a leak somewhere in his own department. He quizzed subordinates; he made abrupt transfers, to no avail.

Meanwhile, the Grays were taking the approaches to the main line of defence, which had been thought relatively immaterial but had been found shrewdly placed and their vulnerability overestimated. The thunders of batteries hammering them became a routine of existence, like the passing of trains to one living near a railroad. The guns went on while tea was being served; they ushered in dawn and darkness; they were going when sleep came to those whom they later awakened with a start. Fights as desperate as the one around the house became features of this period, which was only a warming-up practice for the war demon before the orgy of the impending assault on the main line.

Marta began to realize the immensity of the chess-board and of the forces engaged in more than the bare statement of numbers and distances. If a first attack on a position failed, the wires from the Galland house repeated their orders to concentrate more guns and attack again. In the end the Browns always yielded, but grudgingly, calculatingly, never being taken by surprise. The few of them who fell prisoners said, "God with us! We shall win in the end!" and answered no questions. Gradually the Gray army began to feel that it was battling with a mystery which was fighting under cover, falling back under cover—a tenacious, watchful mystery that sent sprays of death into every finger of flesh that the Grays thrust forward in assault.

"Another position taken. Our advance continues," was the only news that Westerling gave to the army, his people, and the world, which forgot its sports and murders and divorce cases in following the progress of the first great European war for two generations. He made no mention of the costs; his casualty lists were secret. The Gray hosts were sweeping forward as a slow, irresistible tide; this by Partow's own admission. He announced the loss of a position as promptly as the Grays its taking. He published a daily list of casualties so meagre in contrast to their own that the Grays thought it false; he made known the names of the killed and wounded to their relatives. Yet the seeming candor of his press bureau included no straw of information of military value to the enemy.

Westerling never went to tea at the Gallands' with the other officers, for it was part of his cultivation of greatness to keep aloof from his subordinates. His meetings with Marta happened casually when he went out into the garden. Only once had he made any reference to the "And then" of their interview in the arbor.

"I am winning battles for you!" he had exclaimed with that thing in his eyes which she loathed.

To her it was equivalent to saying that she had tricked him into sending men to be killed in order to please her. She despised herself for the way he confided in her; yet she had to go on keeping his confidence, returning a tender glance with one that held out hope. She learned not to shudder when he spoke of a loss of "only ten thousand." In order to rally herself when she grew faint-hearted to her task, she learned to picture the lines of his face hard-set with five-against-three brutality, while in comfort he ordered multitudes to death, and, in contrast, to recall the smile of Dellarme, who asked his soldiers to undergo no risk that he would not share. And after every success he would remark that he was so much nearer Engadir, that position of the main line of defence whose weakness she had revealed.

"Your Engadir!" he came to say. "Then we shall again profit by your information; that is, unless they have fortified since you received it."

"They haven't. They had already fortified!" she thought. She was always seeing the mockery of his words in the light of her own knowledge and her own part, which never quite escaped her consciousness. One chamber of her mind was acting for him; a second chamber was perfectly aware that the other was acting.

"One position more—the Twin Boulder Redoubt, it is called," he announced at last. "We shall not press hard in front. We shall drive in masses on either side and storm the flanks."

This she was telephoning to Lanstron a few minutes later and having, in return, all the news of the Browns. The sheer fascination of knowing what both sides were doing exerted its spell in keeping her to her part.

"They've lost four hundred thousand men now, Lanny," she said.

"And we only a hundred thousand. We're whittling them down," answered Lanstron.

"Whittling them down! What a ghastly expression!" she gasped. "You are as bad as Westerling and I am worse than either of you! I—I announced the four hundred thousand as if they were a score—a score in a game in our favor. I am helping, Lanny? All my sacrifice isn't for nothing?" she asked for the hundredth time.

"Immeasurably. You have saved us many lives!" he replied.

"And cost them many?" she asked.

"Yes, Marta, no doubt," he admitted; "but no more than they would have lost in the end. It is only the mounting up of their casualties that can end the war. Thus the lesson must be taught."

"And I can be of most help when the attack on the main defence is begun?"

"Yes."

"And when Westerling finds that my information is false about Engadir—then—"

She had never put the question to him in this way before. What would Westerling do if he found her out?

"My God, Marta!" he exclaimed. "If I'd had any sense I would have thought of that in the beginning and torn out the 'phone! I've been mad, mad with the one thought of the nation—inhuman in my greedy patriotism. I will not let you go any further!"

It was a new thing for her to be rallying him; yet this she did as the strange effect of his protest on the abnormal sensibilities that her acting had developed.

"Thinking of me—little me!" she called back. "Of one person's comfort when hundreds of thousands of other women are in terror; when the destiny of millions is at stake! Lanny, you are in a blue funk!" and she was laughing forcedly and hectically. "I'm going on—going on like one in a trance who can't stop if he would. It's all right, Lanny. I undertook the task myself. I must see it through!"

After she had hung up the receiver her buoyancy vanished. She leaned against the wall of the tunnel weakly. Yes, what if she were found out? She was thinking of the possibility seriously for the first time. Yet, for only a moment did she dwell upon it before she dismissed it in sudden reaction.

"No matter what they do to me or what becomes of me!" she thought. "I'm a lost soul, anyway. The thing is to serve as long as I can—and then I don't care!"



XXXVII

THUMBS DOWN FOR BOUCHARD

Haggard and at bay, Bouchard faced the circle of frowns around the polished expanse of that precious heirloom, the dining-room table of the Gallands. The dreaded reckoning of the apprehensions which kept him restlessly awake at night had come at the next staff council after the fall of the Twin Boulder Redoubt. With the last approach to the main line of defence cleared, one chapter of the war was finished. But the officers did not manifest the elation that the occasion called for, which is not saying that they were discouraged. They had no doubt that eventually the Grays would dictate peace in the Browns' capital. Exactly stated, their mood was one of repressed professional irritation. Not until the third attempt was Twin Boulder Redoubt taken. As far as results were concerned, the nicely planned first assault might have been a stroke of strategy by the Browns to drive the Grays into an impassable fire zone.

"The trouble is we are not informed!" exclaimed Turcas, opening his thin lips even less than usual, but twisting them in a significant manner as he gave his words a rasping emphasis. The others hastened to follow his lead with equal candor.

"Exactly. We have no reports of their artillery strength, which we had greatly underestimated," said the chief of artillery.

"Our maps of their forts could not be less correct if revealed to us for purposes of deceit. Again and again we have thought that we had them surprised, only to be surprised ourselves. In short, they know what we are doing and we don't know what they are doing!" said the tactical expert.

There the chief of the aerostatic division took the defensive.

"They certainly don't learn our plans with their planes and dirigibles!" he declared energetically.

"Hardly, when we never see them over our lines."

"The Browns are acting on the defensive in the air as well as on the earth!"

"But our own planes and dirigibles bring little news," said Turcas. "I mean, those that return," he added pungently.

"And few do return. My men are not wanting in courage!" replied the chief aerostatic officer. "Immediately we get over the Brown lines the Browns, who keep cruising to and fro, are on us like hawks. They risk anything to bring us down. When we descend low we strike the fire of their high-angle guns, which are distributed the length of the frontier. I believe both their aerial fleet and their high-angle artillery were greatly underestimated. Finally, I cannot reduce my force too much in scouting or they might rake the offensive."

"Another case of not being informed!" concluded Turcas, returning grimly to his point.

He looked at Bouchard, and every one began looking at Bouchard. If the Gray tacticians had been outplayed by their opponents, if their losses for the ground gained exceeded calculations, then it was good to have a scapegoat for their professional mistakes. Bouchard was Westerling's choice for chief of intelligence. His blind loyalty was pleasing to his superior, who, hitherto, had promptly silenced any suggestion of criticism by repeating that the defensive always appeared to the offensive to be better informed than itself. But this time Westerling let the conversation run on without a word of excuse for his favorite.

Each fresh reproach from the staff, whose opinion was the only god he knew, was a dagger thrust to Bouchard. At night he had lain awake worrying about the leak; by day he had sought to trace it, only to find every clew leading back to the staff. Now he was as confused in his shame as a sensitive schoolboy. Vaguely, in his distress, he heard Westerling asking a question, while he saw all those eyes staring at him.

"What information have we about Engadir?"

"I believe it to be strongly fortified!" stammered Bouchard.

"You believe! You have no information?" pursued Westerling.

"No, sir," replied Bouchard. "Nothing—nothing new!"

"We do seem to get little information," said Westerling, looking hard and long at Bouchard in silence—the combined silence of the whole staff.

This public reproof could have but one meaning. He should soon receive a note which would thank him politely for his services, in the stereotyped phrases always used for the purpose, before announcing his transfer to a less responsible post.

"Very little, sir!" Bouchard replied doggedly.

"There is that we had from one of our aviators whose machine came down in a smash just as he got over our infantry positions on his return," said the chief aerostatic officer. "He was in a dying condition when we picked him up, and, as he was speaking with the last breaths in his body, naturally his account of what he had seen was somewhat incoherent. It would be of use, however, if we had plans of the forts that would enable us to check off his report intelligently."

"Yet, what evidence have we that Partow or Lanstron has done more than to make a fortunate guess or show military insight?" Westerling asked. "There is the case of my own belief that Bordir was weak, which proved correct."

"Last night we got a written telegraphic staff message from the body of a dead officer of the Browns found in the Twin Boulder Redoubt," said the vice-chief, "which showed that in an hour after our plans were transmitted to our own troops for the first attack they were known to the enemy."

"That looks like a leak!" exclaimed Westerling, "a leak, Bouchard, do you hear?" He was frowning and his lips were drawn and his cheeks mottled with red in a way not pleasant to see.

Stiffening in his chair, a flash of desperation in his eye, Bouchard's bony, long hand gripped the table edge. Every one felt that a sensation was coming.

"Yes, I have known that there was a leak!" he said with hoarse, painful deliberation. "I have sent out every possible tracer. I have followed up every sort of clew I have transferred a dozen men. I have left nothing undone!"

"With no result?" persisted Westerling impatiently

"Yes, always the same result: That the leak is here in this house—here in the grand headquarters of the army under our very noses. I know it is not the telegraphers or the clerks. It is a member of the staff!"

"Have you gone out of your head?" demanded Westerling. "What staff-officer? How does he get the information to the enemy? Name the persons you suspect here and now! Explain, if you want to be considered sane!"

Here was the blackest accusation that could be made against an officer! The chosen men of the staff, tested through many grades before they reached the inner circle of cabinet secrecy, lost the composure of a council. All were leaning forward toward Bouchard breathless for his answer.

"There are three women on the grounds," said Bouchard. "I have been against their staying from the first. I——."

He got no further. His words were drowned by the outburst of one of the younger members of the staff, who had either to laugh or choke at the picture of this deep-eyed, spectral sort of man, known as a woman-hater, in his revelation of the farcical source of his suspicions.

"Why not include Clarissa Eileen?" some one asked, Starting a chorus of satirical exclamations.

"How do they get through the line?"

"Yes, past a wall of bayonets?"

"When not even a soldier in uniform is allowed to move away from his command without a pass?"

"By wireless?"

"Perhaps by telepathy!"

"Unless," said the chief of the aerostatic division, grinning, "Bouchard lends them the use of our own wires through the capital and around by the neutral countries across the Brown frontier!"

"But the correct plans and location of their forts and the numbers of their heavy guns and of their planes and dirigibles—your failure to have this information is not the result of any leak from our staff since the war began," said Turcas in his dry, penetrating voice, clearing the air of the smoke of scattered explosions.

All were staring at Bouchard again. What answer had he to this? He was in the box, the evidence stated by the prosecutor. Let him speak!

He was fairly beside himself in a paroxysm of rage and struck at the air with his clenched fist.

"—— —— Lanstron!" he cried.

"There's no purpose in that. He can't hear you!" said Turcas, dryly as ever.

"He might, through the leak," said the chief aerostatic officer, who considered that many of his gallant subordinates had lost their lives through Bouchard's inefficiency. "Perhaps Clarissa Eileen has already telepathically wigwagged it to him."

To lose your temper at a staff council is most unbecoming. Turcas would have kept his if hit in the back by a fool automobilist. Westerling had now recovered his. He was again the superman in command.

"It is for you and not for us to locate the leak; yes, for you!" he said. "That is all on the subject for the present," he added in a tone of mixed pity and contempt, which left Bouchard freed from the stare of his colleagues and in the miserable company of his humiliation.

All on the subject for the present! When it was taken up again his successor would be in charge. He, the indefatigable, the over-intense, with his mediaeval partisan fervor, who loathed in secret machines like Turcas, was the first man of the staff to go for incompetency.

"And Engadir is the key-point," Westerling was saying.

"Yes," agreed Turcas.

"So we concentrate to break through there," Westerling continued, "while we engage the whole line fiercely enough to make the enemy uncertain where the crucial attack is to be made."

"But, general, if there is any place that is naturally strong, that—" Turcas began.

"The one place where they are confident that we won't attack!" Westerling interrupted. He resented the staff's professional respect for Turcas. After a silence and a survey of the faces around, he added with sententious effect: "And I was right about Bordir!"

To this argument there could be no answer. The one stroke of generalship by the Grays, who, otherwise, had succeeded alone through repeated mass attacks, had been Westerling's hypothesis that had gained Bordir in a single assault.

"Engadir it is, then!" said Turcas with the loyalty of the subordinate who makes a superior's conviction his own, the better to carry it out.

Hazily, Bouchard had heard the talk, while he was looking at Westerling and seeing him, not at the head of the council table, but in the arbor in eager appeal to Marta.

"I shall find out! I shall find out!" was drumming in his temples when the council rose; and, without a word or a backward glance, he was the first to leave the room.



XXXVIII

HUNTING GHOSTS

In his search for the medium of the leak to the enemy Bouchard had studied every detail of the Galland premises and also of the ruins of the castle, with the exception of one feature mentioned in the regular staff records, prepared before the war, in the course of their minute description of the architecture of buildings which were accessible to the spies of the Grays. The tunnel to the dungeons could be reached only through the private quarters of the Gallands.

When he came out onto the veranda from the staff council a glimpse of Mrs. Galland walking in the garden told him that one of the guardians who stood between him and the satisfaction of his desperate curiosity was absent. He started for the tower and found the door open and the sitting-room empty. In his impatience he had one foot across the threshold before a prompting sense of respect for form made him pause. After all, this was a private residence. There being no bell, he rapped, and was glad that it was Minna and not Marta who appeared. He watched her intently for the effect of his abrupt announcement as he exclaimed:

"I want to go into the tunnel under the castle!"

There was no mistaking her shock and alarm. Her lips remained parted in a letter O as a sweep of breath escaped. Yet, in the very process of recovering her scattered faculties, her feminine quickness noted a triumphant gleam in his eye. She knew that her manner had given conviction to his suspicions. She knew that she alone stood between him and his finding Marta talking to Brown headquarters. As she was in a state of astonishment, why, astonishment was her cue. She appeared positively speechless from it except for the emission of another horrified gasp. Time! time! She must hold him until Marta left the telephone.

"What an idea! That musty, horrible, damp tunnel!" she exclaimed, shuddering. "I never think of it without thinking of ghosts!"

"I am looking for ghosts," replied Bouchard with saturnine emphasis.

"Oh, don't say that!" cried Minna distractedly. "Sometimes at night I hear their chains clanking and their groans and cries for water," she continued, playing the superstitious and stupid maid servant. "That is, I think I do. Miss Galland says I don't."

"Does she go into the tunnel?" asked Bouchard.

"Yes, she's been in to show me that there were no ghosts," replied Minna. "But not the whole way—not into the dungeons. I believe she got frightened herself, though she wouldn't admit it. I know there are ghosts! She needn't tell me! Don't you believe there are?" she asked solemnly, with dropped jaw.

"I'm going to find out!" he said, taking a step forward.

But Minna, just inside the doorway, did not move to allow him to enter.

"Oh, I'm so glad!" she exclaimed. "Then we'll know the truth. But no!" and she turned wild with protest. "No, no! I know there are! It's dangerous, sir! You'd never come out alive! Unseen hands would seize you and draw you down and strangle you—those terrible spirits of the dark ages!"

Her hands uplifted, fingers stretched apart in terror, lace white with fear, Minna's distress was real—very real, indeed!—while she listened impatiently for Marta's step in the adjoining room.

"Good heavens!" exclaimed Bouchard in disgust. "I didn't know such superstition existed in this day."

"I didn't, sir, until the groans and the clanking of the chains kept me awake," replied Minna.

"Have you a lantern?" asked Bouchard in exasperation.

"A lantern?" repeated Minna blankly. Time! time! She must gain time!

"Yes, you gawk, a lantern!"

"Certainly; you'll need one," said Minna—"a big one! Go and fetch a big army one—and some soldiers to fight the ghosts. But what are soldiers against ghosts? Oh, sir, I don't like to think of you going at all. Please, sir, don't, for the sake of your life!"

There Bouchard frowned heavily and his hawk eyes flashed in command and decision.

"Enough of this farce! A lamp, a candle will do. Come, get me one immediately!"

Just as she was at her wits' end and it seemed as if there were nothing left to do but to scream and fall in a faint in front of Bouchard, her ear caught the welcome sound which told her that Marta had returned from the tunnel.

"Yes, sir. Won't you come in, sir? Of course, sir," she said, standing aside. "Won't you be seated, sir?"

"Good day, Colonel Bouchard!" called Marta, appearing in the doorway.

"He wants to go into the dungeons to see the ghosts!" Minna exclaimed in a return of horror before Bouchard had time to say a word, while she screwed up the side of her face away from him suggestively to Marta. "Those terrible ghosts! I'm afraid for him. Like a man, he may go right into the dungeons, even if you didn't dare to, Miss Galland."

"I wish he would!" Marta joined in eagerly. "That might cure you of your silly imaginings, Minna. She actually thinks, Colonel Bouchard, that she hears them groan and moan and even shriek. Didn't you say they shrieked as well as groaned and moaned once about 3 A.M.?" she asked jocularly.

"A ghost must be hard put to it when he shrieks," observed Bouchard, glaring from one to the other.

"It's all very well for you to make fun of me because you have the advantage of an education," said Minna to Marta, "but you yourself—you—"

"Yes, I did hear what sounded like moaning voices," admitted Marta rather sheepishly. "But of course it was imagination. Now we have a man with nerve enough to go into the dungeons, we'll lay this ridiculous psychological bugaboo at once; that is, if you have the nerve!" She arched her brows in challenging scrutiny of Bouchard, while her eyes twinkled at the prospect of adventure. "I thought I had, myself, but before I got to the dungeons the clammy air wilted it and I was rubbing my eyes to keep from seeing all kinds of apparitions."

She puzzled Bouchard, she was so facile, so ready, so many-sided. But the more she puzzled him the stronger became his conviction of her guilt. He guessed that all this talk was only a prelude to some trick to keep him out of the tunnel. Poor at speech at best, slightly fussed by her candid good humor and teasing, he hesitated as to his next remark. He was going to be short with her in stating that he would go into the tunnel immediately, when she took the words out of his mouth.

"This way, please. I'm all impatience. I only wish that you had suggested it before."

As they passed out of the room Minna leaned against the wall, exhausted and wonder-struck.

"Miss Galland is beyond me!" she thought. "Does she think those hawk eyes will miss that little button of the panel door?"

"We'll need a lantern," said Marta as she took up the one she had been using from a corner of the tool room; while Bouchard, slowly turning his head like some automaton, was examining every detail of floor and wall, spades, hoes, and weeders, for a hidden significance. The lantern was still hot, and Marta's finger smarted with a burn, but she did not twitch. She was so keyed up that she felt capable of walking over red-hot coals, while she joked about ghosts. "There!" she exclaimed, after the lantern was lighted. "This is going to be great sport. Ghost hunting—think of that! We might have made a ghost party Too bad we didn't think of it in time. Yes, it's a pity to be so exclusive about it. Even now we might send for General Westerling and some of the other staff-officers."

She paused and looked at Bouchard questioningly, perhaps challengingly; at least, he thought challengingly. He had half a mind to concur. Could anything be better than to have Westerling present if suspicions proved correct? But no. She wanted Westerling and that was the best reason why he should not be present. Yet there was no sign of chicane in the brimming fun of her eyes that went with the suggestion. Bouchard's search for the proper words of dissent left him rather confused and at a disadvantage. With sympathetic quickness she seemed to guess his thoughts, and in a way that he found all the more exasperating.

"No, no! We're too impatient! We can't wait, can we?" she exclaimed. "Let's go. Let's get the ghosts single-handed, you and I. If we win we'll demand a specially large bronze cross to be struck for us."

"Yes," he agreed with an affectation of humor that made him feel ludicrous. He always felt ludicrous when he tried to be humorous.

"Come on!" said Marta, going to the stairway.

He extended his hand to take the lantern with an "If you please!"

"No. When we approach the enemy I'll let you lead," she replied, refusing the offer. "I'll be only too glad then; but these stairs are very tricky if you don't know them. Keep watch!" she warned him as she started to descend, picking her way slowly.

Once in the tunnel she held the lantern a little back of her in her right hand, which threw a shadow to the left on the side of the panel door. She was walking very fast, too fast to please Bouchard. In the swinging rays he could not fly-speck the surroundings with the care that he desired. Yet how could he ask her to slacken her pace? This she did of her own accord before they had gone far.

"Isn't it damp and deathlike? Think of it!" she exclaimed. "No ray of sunlight has been in here since the tunnel was dug—no, not even then; for probably it was dug after the castle was built. Think of the stories these walls could tell after the silence of centuries! Think of the prisoners driven along at the point of the halberd to slow death in the dungeons! You feel their spirits in the cold, clammy air." Her elocution was excellent, as her voice sank to an awed whisper, impressing even Bouchard with a certain uncanniness. Her steps became slow, as with effort, while he was not missing a square inch of the top, bottom, or sides of the tunnel. "But I'll not—I'll not this time, when I have a soldier with me. For once I'll go to the end!" she cried with forced courage, suddenly starting forward at a half run that sent the lantern's rays lurching and dancing in a way that confused the hawk eyes. Then her burst of strength seemed to give out in collapse and she dropped against the wall for support, her back covering the panel door.

"I can't! I'm just foolishly, weakly feminine!" she whispered brokenly. "According to reason there aren't any ghosts, I know. But it gets on my nerves too much-my imaginings!" She held out the lantern with a trembling hand. "I will wait here. You go on in!" she begged. "Please do and show me what a fool I am! Show that it is all a woman's hysteria—for we are all hysterical, aren't we? Go into every dungeon, please!"

She did seem on the verge of hysteria, quivering as die was from head to foot. But Bouchard, holding the lantern and staring at her, his eyes unearthly lustrous in the yellow rays, hesitated to agree to the request because it was hers. Marta was not so near hysteria that she did not divine his thought.

"Has it got on your nerves, too?" she inquired. "Are you, too, afraid?"

"No, I'm not afraid!" replied Bouchard irritably. "But aren't you afraid to be left alone in the dark? I'll take you back to the sitting-room and you can wait there," he added with a show of gallantry, which she improved on with a flattering if scared smile.

"I'm not afraid with you between me and the dungeons," she said. "I'll hold my ground. Don't think me altogether a craven."

"Very well," was all that he could say. "I came to see the dungeons, and I'll see them!"

After the lantern flame grew fainter and finally disappeared around a bend, Marta emitted a peculiar, squeaky little laugh. It sounded to her as if her own ghost—the ghost of her former self—were laughing in satire. There was a devilish, mischievous joy in battling to outwit Bouchard more than in her deceit of Westerling. Satire, yes—needle-pointed, acid-tipped! Melodrama done in burlesque, too. In the name of the noble art of war, a bit of fooling about ghosts in a tunnel might influence the fate of armies that were the last word in modern equipment. And men played at killing with a grand front of martial dignity, when such a little thing could turn the balance of slaughter! The ghosts in the dungeons seemed about as real as anything, except the childishness of adult humanity in organized mass. She laughed again, this time very softly, as she moved away from the panel door a few steps farther along the wall toward the entrance and again leaned back for support.

She had to wait a half-hour before she saw a yellow flame reappear and heard the dully echoing steps of Bouchard approaching. That tiny push-button on the panel, of the color of stone, was in the shadow of her figure against the lantern's rays, which gave a glazed and haunted effect to Bouchard's eyes, rolling as he studied the walls and ceiling and floor of the tunnel in final baffled and desperate inquiry.

"Did you see anything? Did you go into all the dungeons?" Marta called to him.

Bouchard did not answer. Perhaps he was too full of disgust for words. Marta, however, had plenty of words in her impatience for knowledge.

"If there were you must have caught them with a quick strangle-hold. Or, did you see one and not dare to go on? Tell me! tell me!" she insisted when he stopped before her, his expression a strange mixture of defiance and dissatisfaction while he was searching the wall around her figure. Before his eye had any inclination to look as far away from her as the button she stepped free of the wall and laid her hand on Bouchard's arm. "I can't wait! I've nearly perished of suspense!" she cried. "I'm just dying to know what you found. Please tell me!"

Meanwhile, she was looking into his eyes, which were eagerly devouring the spot that her figure had hidden. He saw nothing but bare stone. Marta slipped her hand behind her and began brushing her back.

"My gown must be a sight!" she exclaimed. "But I do believe you saw a ghost and that he struck you speechless!"

"No!" exploded Bouchard. "No, I saw nothing!"

"Nothing!" she repeated. She half turned to go. He passed by her with the lantern, while she kept to the side of the wall which held the button, covering it with her shadow successfully. "Nothing! No bones, no skulls—not even any anklets fastened by chains to the clammy, wet stones?"

"Yes, just an ordinary set of Middle Age dungeons and some staples in the walls!" he grumbled.

This was no news to her as, with Minna for company, she had explored all the underground passages.

"Wonderful! I suppose a little courage will always lay ghosts!" She even found it difficult to conceal a note of triumph in her tone, for the button was now well behind them. "It's all right, Minna; there aren't any ghosts!" she called as they entered the sitting-room. And Minna, in the kitchen, covered her mouth lest she should scream for joy.

"Thank you!" said Bouchard grudgingly as Marta saw him to the door.

"On the contrary, thank you! It was such fun—if I hadn't been so scared," replied Marta, and their gaze held each other fast in a challenge, hers beaming good nature and his saturnine in its rebuff and a hound-like tenacity of purpose, saying plainly that his suspicions were not yet laid.

When Bouchard returned to his desk he guessed the contents of the note awaiting him, but he took a long time to read its stereotyped expressions in transferring him to perfunctory duty well to the rear of the army. Then he pulled himself together and, leaden-hearted, settled down to arrange routine details for his departure, while the rest of the staff was immersed in the activity of the preparations for the attack on Engadir. He knew that he could not sleep if he lay down. So he spent the night at work. In the morning his successor, a young man whom he himself had chosen and trained, Colonel Bellini, appeared, and the fallen man received the rising man with forced official courtesy.

"In my own defence and for your aid," he said, "I show you a copy of what I have just written to General Westerling."

A brief note it was, in farewell, beginning with conventional thanks for Westerling's confidence in the past.

"I am punished for being right," it concluded. "It is my belief that Miss Galland sends news to the enemy and that she draws it from you without your consciousness of the fact. I tell you honestly. Do what you will with me."

It took more courage than any act of his life for the loyal Bouchard to dare such candor to a superior. Seeing the patchy, yellow, bloodless face drawn in stiff lines and the abysmal stare of the deep-set eyes in their bony recesses, Bellini was swept with a wave of sympathy.

"Thank you, Bouchard. You've been very fine!" said Bellini as he grasped Bouchard's hand, which was icy cold.

"My duty—my duty, in the hope that we shall kill two Browns for every Gray who has fallen—that we shall yet see them starved and besieged and crying for mercy in their capital," replied Bouchard. He saluted with a dismal, urgent formality and stalked out of the room with the tread of the ghost of Hamlet's father.

The strange impression that this farewell left with Bellini still lingered when, a few moments later, Westerling summoned him. Not alone the diffidence of a new member of the staff going into the Presence accounted for the stir in his temples, as he waited till some papers were signed before he had Westerling's attention. Then Westerling picked up Bouchard's note and shook his head sadly.

"Poor Bouchard! You can see for yourself," and he handed the note to Bellini. "I should have realized earlier that it was a case for the doctor and not for reprimand. Mad! Poor Bouchard! He hadn't the ability or the resiliency of mind for his task, as I hope you have, colonel."

"I hope so, sir," replied Bellini.

"I've no doubt you have," said Westerling. "You are my choice!"



XXXIX

A CHANGE OF PLAN

That day and the next Westerling had no time fix strolling in the garden. His only exercise was a few periods of pacing on the veranda. Turcas, as tirelessly industrious as ever, developed an increasingly quiet insistence to leave the responsibility of decisions about everything of importance to a chief who was becoming increasingly arbitrary. The attack on Engadir being the jewel of Westerling's own planning, he was disinclined to risk success by delegating authority, which also meant sharing the glory of victory.

Bouchard's note, though officially dismissed as a matter of pathology, would not accept dismissal privately. In flashes of distinctness it recurred to him between reports of the progress of preparations and directions as to dispositions. At dusk of the second day, when all the guns and troops had their places for the final movement under cover of darkness and he rose from his desk, the thing that had edged its way into a crowded mind took possession of the premises that strategy and tactics had vacated. It passed under the same analysis as his work. His overweening pride, so sensitive to the suspicion of a conviction that he had been fooled, put his relations with Marta in logical review.

He had fallen in love in the midst of war. This fact was something that his egoism must resent. Any woman who had struck such a response in him as she had must have great depths. Had she depths that he had not fathomed? He recalled her sudden change of attitude toward war, her conversion to the cause of the Grays, and her charm in this as in all their relations.

Was it conceivable that the change was not due to a personal feeling for him? Was her charm a charm with a purpose? Had he, the chief of staff, been beguiled into making a woman his confidant in military secrets? Just what had he told her? He could not recollect anything definite and recollection was the more difficult because he could not call to mind a single pertinent military question that she had ever asked him. Such information as he might have imparted had been incidental to their talks.

He had enveloped her in glamour; his most preciously trained mental qualities lapsed in her presence. It was time that she was regarded impersonally, as a woman, by the critical eye of the chief of staff. A cool and intense impatience possessed him to study her in the light Of his new scepticism, when, turning the path of the first terrace, he saw her watching the sunset over the crest of the range.

She was standing quite still, a slim, soft shadow between him and the light, which gilded her figure and quarter profile. Did she expect him? he wondered. Was she posing at that instant for his benefit? And the answer, could he have searched her secret brain, was, Yes—yes, if the conscious and the subconscious mind are to be considered as one responsible intelligence. He usually came at that hour. But he had not come last night. They had not met since Bouchard's ghost hunt.

There was no firing near by; only desultory artillery practice in the distance. She heard the familiar crunch of five against three on the gravel. She knew that he had stopped at the turn of the path, and she was certain that he was looking at her! But she did not make the slightest movement. The golden light continued to caress her profile. Then, crunch, crunch, rather slowly, the five against three drew nearer. The delay had been welcome; it had been to her a moment's respite to get her breath before entering the lists. When she turned, her face in the shadow, the glow of the sunset seemed to remain in her eyes, otherwise without expression, yet able to detect something unusual under externals as they exchanged commonplaces of greeting.

"Well, there's a change in our official family. We have lost Bouchard—transferred to another post!" said Westerling.

Marta noted that, though he gave the news a casual turn, his scrutiny sharpened.

"Is that so? I can't say that my mother and I shall be sorry," she remarked. "He was always glaring at us as if he wished us out of his sight. Indeed, if he had his way, I think he would have made us prisoners of war. Wasn't he a woman-hater?" she concluded, half in irritation, half in amusement.

"He had that reputation," said Westerling. "What do you think led to his departure?" he continued.

"I confess I cannot guess!" said Marta, with a look at the sunset glow as if she resented the loss of a minute of it.

"There has been a leak of information to the Browns!" he announced.

"There has! And he was intelligence officer, wasn't he?" she asked, turning to Westerling, her curiosity apparently roused as a matter of courtesy to his own interest in the subject.

"Who do you think he accused? Why, you," he added, with a peculiar laugh.

She noted the peculiarity of the laugh discriminatingly.

"Oh!" Her eyes opened wide in wonder—only wonder, at first. Then, as comprehension took the place of wonder, they grew sympathetic. "That explains!" she exclaimed. "His hateful glances were those of delusion. He was going mad, you mean?"

"Yes," said Westerling, "that—that would explain it!"

"I have been told that when people go mad they always ascribe every injury done to them to the person who happens to have excited their dislike," she mused.

"Which seems to have been the case here," Westerling assented. He did not know what else to say.

"It was the strain of war, wasn't it?" Marta proceeded thoughtfully. "I notice that all the staff-officers are showing it; that is," she added on second thought, quite literally, as she regarded him for an instant of silence, "all except you. You remain the same, calm and decisive." There she looked away with a flutter of her lashes, as if she were shamed at having allowed herself to be caught in open admiration of him. "Look! The last effulgence of rose!" she went on hurriedly about the sunset. "Why shouldn't we think of the sky as heaven, as Nirvana? What better immortality than to be absorbed into that?"