“You called sooner than I expected,” she said in a note of equivocal pleasantry.

“Or I,” he rejoined with a shade of triumph, the politest of triumph.  He was a step above her, her head on a level with the pocket of his blouse.  His square shoulders, commanding height, and military erectness were thus emphasized, as was her own feminine slightness.

“I want to thank you,” she said.  “As becomes a soldier, your forethought was expressed in action.  It was the promptness of the men you sent to look after the garden which saved the uprooted plants before they were past recovery.”

“I wished it for your sake and somewhat for my own sake to be the same that it was in the days when I used to call,” he said graciously.  “Tea was from four to five, do you remember?  Will you join me?  I have just ordered it.”

A generous, pleasant conqueror, this!  No one knew better than Westerling how to be one when he chose.  He was something of an actor.  Leaders of men of his type usually are.

“Why, yes.  Very gladly!” she assented with no undue cordiality and no undue constraint, quite as if there were no war.

“It was the Browns who cut the lindens?” he suggested significantly.

“They said that it was necessary as part of the defence,” she replied.  “We shall plant new ones and have the pleasure of watching them grow.”

Neutrality could not be better impersonated he thought, than in the even cleaving of her lips over the words.  They seemed to say that a storm had come and gone and a new set of masters had taken the place of the old.  As they approached the veranda Francois was placing the tea things.

“Quite the same!  That was your chair, as I remember,” said Westerling after indicating to Francois that he might go, “and this was mine.”

But the teapot was not Mrs. Galland’s—­it belonged to the staff.

“This is different,” observed Marta, touching her finger-tip to the coat of arms of the Grays on the side of a cup.

“Yes, my own field kit,” he answered, thinking that the novelty of tea from a soldier’s service had appealed to her; for she was smiling.

“So, you being the host and I the guest now, why, you pour!” she said.  There was a touch of brittleness in her tone—­of half-teasing, half-serious brittleness.

“Oh, no, no!” he protested laughingly, and found her glance flashing through her brows holding him fast in an indefinable challenge.

“I shall pour when you do us the honor to come to tea at the gardener’s quarters in the tower,” she said.

“No, no!” he objected.  “The tea conditions are the same as before.”

He was earnest for his point.  It would please his masculine fancy to watch those firm, small fingers pausing over the cup before the plunge of a lump of sugar stirred the miniature ocean in waves; to watch the firm little hand in its grip of the handle of the pot.