He made his appeal finely, as he well knew how to do.  A certain magnetic eloquence that went well with his handsome face and sturdy bearing had been his most successful asset in making him chief of staff.

The tattoo of her fingers died down while she listened to his final, serious reasons about a subject that became peculiarly significant; and her brows lifted, her eyes opened in the surprise of one who gets a sudden new angle of light.

“You put it very well.  In that case—­” she said, and his glance and hers dropped, his to the capable hand on the handle of the teapot, hers into the cup.  “With the honors of war and officers permitted to retain their side-arms?” she asked.

“Yes; oh, yes!” he answered happily.

She smiled her acknowledgment with just that self-respect of capitulation which flatters the victor with the thought that he has overcome no mean opponent—­the highest form of compliment known to the guild of courtiers.

He was susceptible to it and, in turn, to the curiosity about her that had remained unsatisfied at the end of their talk in the hotel.  Her own veranda was the natural, familiar place to judge the work of time in those character-forming years from seventeen to twenty-seven.  She was not like what she had been in the artificial surroundings of a fortnight ago.  She filled the eye and the mind now in the well-knit suppleness of figure and the finished maturity of features which bore the mark of inner growth of knowledge of life.  She was not a species of intellectual exotic, as he had feared, too baffling to allow the male intellect to feel comfortable, but very much, as he noted discriminatingly, a woman in all the physical freshness of a woman in her prime.

“Just like the old days, isn’t it?” he exclaimed with his first sip, convinced that the officers’ commissary supplied excellent tea in the field.

“Yes, for the moment—­if we forget the war!” she replied, and looked away, preoccupied, toward the landscape.

If we forget the war!  She bore on the words rather grimly.  The change that he had noted between the Marta of the hotel reception-room and the Marta of the moment was not altogether the work of ten years.  It had developed since she was in the capital.  In these three weeks war had been brought to her door.  She had been under heavy fire.  Yet this subject of the war was the one which he, as an invader, considered himself bound to avoid.

“We do forget it at tea, don’t we?” he asked.

“At least we need not speak of it!” she replied.

Safely, then, at first, their conversation ran not on the present but on an intimate past, free of any possible bumpers.  The train of memories once started, she herself gave it speed if it stopped at a way station; cargo if it went empty.  Prone to avoid recollections that made him feel old—­to feel old was to be out of date in his profession—–­he found these livening with the youth of thirty-two