Rather idly, now, he drew a pad toward him and, taking up a pencil, made the figures seventeen and twenty-seven.  Then he made the figures thirty-two and forty-two.  He blackened them with repeated tracings as he mused.  This done, he put seventeen under twenty-seven and thirty-two under forty-two.  He made the subtraction and studied the two tens.

A swing door opened softly and his executive clerk reappeared with a soft tread, unheard by Westerling engaged in mechanically blackening the tens.  The clerk, pausing as he waited for a signal of recognition, observed the process wonderingly.  To be absently making figures on a pad was not characteristic of the vice-chief of staff.  When he was absorbed his habit was to tap the desk edge with the blunt end of his pencil.

“Some papers for your signature, sir,” said the clerk as he slipped them on the blotter in front of Westerling.  “And the 132d—­no order about that, sir?” he asked.

“None.  It remains!” Westerling replied.

The clerk went out impressed.  His chief taking to sums of subtraction and totally preoccupied!  The 132d to remain!  He, too, had a question-mark in his secret mind.

Westerling proceeded with his mathematics.  Having heavily shaded the tens, he essayed a sum in division.  He found that ten went into seventy just seven times.

“One-seventh the allotted span of life!” he mused.  “Take off fifteen years for youth and fifteen after fifty-five—­nobody counts after that, though I mean to—­and you have ten into forty, which is one fourth.  That is a good deal.  But it’s more to a woman than to a man—­yes, a lot more to a woman than to a man!”

The clerk was right in thinking Westerling preoccupied; but it was not with the international crisis.  He had dismissed that for the present from his thoughts by sending the 128th Regiment to South La Tir.  He might move some other regiments in the morning if advices from the premier warranted.  At all events, the army was ready, always ready for any emergency.  He was used to international crises.  Probably a dozen had occurred in the ten years since he had spoken his adieu to a young girl at a garden-gate.  Over his coffee the name of Miss Marta Galland, in a list of arrivals at a hotel, had caught his eye in the morning paper.  A note to her had brought an answer, saying that her time was limited, but she would be glad to have him call at five that afternoon.

Rather impatiently he watched the slow minute-hand on the clock.  He had risen from his desk at four-thirty, when his personal aide, a handsome, boyish, rosy-cheeked young officer, who seemed to be moulded into his uniform, appeared.

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