“That is one way of putting it—­yes.”

“If I keep your secret—­if I let the telephone remain, I am an accomplice!  I shall not be that—­not to any kind of murder!  I shall not let the telephone remain!”

“As you will, Marta,” he replied.  “But anything that leads to victory means less slaughter in the end.  For we have tested our army well enough to know that only when it is decimated will it ever retreat from its main line of defence.”

“The old argument!” she answered bitterly.

“As you will, Marta!  Only, Marta—­I plead with you—­please, please leave the house!” he begged passionately.

Again that request, which was acid to the raw spot of her anger!  Again that assumption that she must desert her own home because uninvited guests would make it the theatre of their quarrel!  How clear and unassailable her reply in the purview of her distraught logic!

“Why particularly care for one life when you deal in lives by the wholesale?” she demanded.  “Why think of my life when you are taking other lives every minute?”

“Because I am human, not just a machine!  Because yours is the one life of all to me—­because I love you!” Feller, getting only one side of the talk, cautiously watching her as he held up the lantern to throw her face more clearly in relief, saw her start and caught the sound of a quick indrawing of breath between her lips, while something electric quivered through her frame.  Then, as one who has twinged from a pin-prick of distraction which she will not permit to waive her from a white-heat purpose, she exclaimed, in rapid, stabbing, desperate sentences: 

“That!  That now!  After what I said to you a week ago!  That in the midst of your mowing!  No, no, no!” She drove the receiver down on the hook and blazed out to Feller:  “Now you will tear out the ‘phone’”

He steadied himself against the wall, covering his face with his hands, and for the first time in her life she heard a man sob.

“My one chance—­my last chance—­gone!” he said brokenly.  “The chance for me to redeem myself, so that I might again look at the flag without shame, taken from me in the name of mercy, when, by helping to bring victory and shorten the war, I might have saved thousands of lives!” he proceeded dismally.

“The old argument!  Lanny has just used it!” said Marta.  But coming from a man sobbing it sounded differently.  His hands fell away from his face as if they were a dead weight.  She saw him a wreck of a human being with only his eyes alive, regarding her in harrowing wonder and reproach.

“When I was a gardener eating at the kitchen table, playing the part of a spy—­I who was honor man at the military school—­I who had a conscience that sent me back from the free life on the plains to try to atone—­when I hoped to do this thing in order to prove that I was fit to die if not to live——­”

He was as a man pitting his last grain of strength against overwhelming odds.  There were long, poignant pauses between his sentences as he seemed to strive for coherence.