The roar of battle kept up its steady refrain in the direction of the range.  Marta had heard it when she fell asleep and heard it when she awakened.  A battery of heavy guns of the Grays broke their flashes from a knoll this side of the one where Dellarme’s men had made their first stand.  At the foot of the garden, where yesterday she had distributed flowers to the wounded Browns, a regiment of Gray infantry was marching past a train of siege-guns.  All the figures moving on the landscape, which yesterday had been brown, had changed to gray.  The Grays were masters of the town and all the neighborhood.

Marta stepped down from the veranda in response to the call of the open air to physical vigor renewed after sweet sleep.  Rather than return directly to the kitchen, where breakfast was waiting, she would go around the house.  She stopped before a Japanese maple which had been split by a shell striking in a crotch.  Was there any hope of saving it?  No.  She turned white about the lips, with red spots on her cheeks, and at length nodded her head as if in answer to some inward question.

Over the sward, cut by shell fragments, lay torn limbs and bits of bark, and in the shade of a tree near the road she had a glimpse of the shoulder of the gray uniform of a prostrate man.  The rest of him was hidden by the low-hanging branches of one of the Norway spruces which bordered the estate at this point.  Another step and she saw a circular red spot on a white leg bandage; another, and a white square of paper pinned to a blouse; another, and she identified the wounded man as her hero of the scene in the dining-room.

Hugo’s eyes were closed, his breaths slow, in restless sleep.  His face, flushed with fever, was winningly boyish and frank.  He who had had the courage to speak alone against the opinion of his fellows, to voice a belief that made every sympathetic chord in her own mind sing with praise and understanding, the courage to say that invasion was wrong even when made by his own people, had been labelled coward and left to die!

The exaltation of his features when he had been the champion of her beliefs and her impulse against the barbarism of his comrades and the charm of their resignation now, the pitifulness of his condition—­all had an appeal as she bent over him that called for an expression having the touch of the sublimely feminine.  She took his hand in hers and pressed it gently.  He awoke and brought himself jerkily to a sitting posture.  The effort made a crash in his head that sent his senses swimming.  She thought that he was going to swoon and slipped her arm behind him in support and, the Marta of impulse, pressed her lips to his brow.  After the first racking throb of his temples he was able to steady himself, and as she drew away she saw his blue eyes starting in wonder at her act.

“I—­I had to do it to thank you for what you did in the dining-room!” she stammered.