“I—­you mean I was too detached?  I was not human?”

“You are now.  You make me very happy,” her mother replied.  “But you must sleep,” she insisted.

After a time, her ear becoming as accustomed to the firing as a city dweller’s to the distant roar of city traffic Mrs. Galland slept.  But Marta could not follow her advice.  If, transiently at least, she had found something of the peace of the confessional, the vigor of youth was in her arteries; and youth cannot help remaining awake under some conditions.  She tiptoed across the hall into her own room and seated herself by the window, which had often spread the broadening vista of landscape with its lessening detail before her eyes.

On other nights she had looked out into opaqueness with the drum-beat of rain on the roof; into the faint starlight when there was only the vagueness of heights and levels; into the harvest moonlight with its spectral unreality.  Now the symbol of what the ear had heard the eye saw:  war, working in tones of the landscape by day with smokeless powder; war, revealed by its tongues of flame at night.  Ugly bursts of fire from the higher hills spread to the heavens like an aurora borealis and broke their messengers in sheets of flame over the lower hills—­the batteries of the Browns sprinkling death about the heads of the gunners of the Grays emplacing their batteries.  Staccato flashes from a single point counted so many bullets from an automatic, which, directed by the beams of the search-lights, found their targets in sections of advancing infantry.  Hill crests, set off with flashes running back and forth, demarked infantry lines of the Browns assisting the automatics.

There were lulls between the crashes of the small arms and the heavy, throaty speech of the guns; lulls that seemed to say that both sides had paused for a breathing spell; lulls that allowed the battle in the distance to be heard in its pervasive undertone.  In one Of them, when even the undertone had ceased for a few seconds, Marta caught faintly the groans of a wounded man—­one of the crew of a Gray dirigible burned by an explosion and brought in his agony softly to earth by a billowing piece of envelope which acted as a parachute.

Fighting proceeded in La Tir in stages of ferocity and blank silence.  The upper part of the town, which the Browns still held, was in darkness; the lower part, where the Grays were, was illuminated.

“Another one of Lanny’s plans!” thought Marta.  “He would have them work in the light, while we fire out of obscurity!”

Soon all the town was in darkness, for the Grays had cut the wire in the main conduit shortly after she had heard the groans of the wounded man.  There the automatics broke out in a mad storm, voicing their feelings at getting a company in close order in a street for the space of a minute, before those who escaped could plaster themselves against doorways or find cover in alleys.  Then silence from the automatics and a cheer from the Browns that rasped out its triumph like the rubbing together of steel files.