and gratifying as youth’s dreams become reality.  Feeling as young as a colonel, he had the consciousness of being chief of staff.  This was enough to make any soldier enjoy the place and the company and to drink his tea slowly so as to prolong the recess from duty.  His second cup growing cold, he was reminded of the value of time, and with a playfully reproachful look at Marta he put a warning finger of conscience on the papers that lay beside the bread plate.

“There’s work—­always work for a chief!” he declared.  “I—­”

Marta was quick to act on the hint.  Her hands flew to the arms of her chair as she spoke.

“There’s always the garden for me!  But first—­” Yes, first there was poor Hugo.

Westerling flushed guiltily that she should have taken his words as a hint, which was only half of his emotion.  The other half shot out his hand in a restraining, companionable touch on her forearm, while his eyes—­his calculating gray eyes—­glinted a youthful entreaty.

“Please!  I didn’t finish my sentence!” he begged.  “You remember that often I used to wait after tea until the sunset—­”

“And reached your quarters late for dinner, I also remember!” she put in.  But she remained in the same position, his finger-tips on her arm, her hands holding her body free of the chair.  “That is, when you did not stay to dinner!” she added.

“I am staying to-night.  I was going to ask if you wouldn’t remain on the veranda while I go over these papers.  It—­it would be very cosey and pleasant.”

One of these papers, she knew, must be the evidence against Hugo Mallin.  She preferred not to make a direct appeal but to have Westerling bring up the subject himself.  His smile and the look with which he regarded her spoke his appreciation of the picture she made and his fear of losing it.  Very cosey and pleasant, yes, the company of a prophetess, with a ray of sunlight making her hair an aurora of flashing bronze overtopping a brown face, the eyes holding answers to an increasing number of unasked questions about the new forces that he had found in her.

“Why, yes,” she agreed with evident pleasure, for she was thinking of Hugo.

Turcas now came, in answer to Westerling’s ring.  The orders and suggestions on the table seemed to be the product of this lath of a man, the vice-chief, but a lath of steel, not wood, who appeared a runner trained for a race of intellects in the scratch class.  One by one, almost perfunctorily, Westerling gave his assent as he passed the papers to Turcas; while Turcas’s dry voice, coming from between a narrow opening of the thin lips, gave his reasons with a rapid-firer’s precision in answer to his chief’s inquiries.