After it was told the letter proceeded: 

“’I feel that I was a coward up to the moment that everybody else was calling me a coward.  Then I felt free and happy, as if I had been true to myself.  I felt that I had been just as much in the wrong as if we should break into our neighbor’s house and take his property because we were stronger than he.  How would you feel if a neighbor entered your house and made it his own?  You would call in the police.  But what if there were no police?  Would that make it right?’”

Marta’s own opinions!  The spirit of her children’s prayer!  Head bent, hands clasped, she was simply listening.

“’Would it be cowardice if one of the neighbor’s family said, “I will not take any further part in this robbery!” when he saw you, mother, weeping over you, father, as you lay dead after trying to defend your house?  When I was asked to fire at those running men it was like standing on a neighbor’s door-step and firing down the street at my neighbors in flight.  I could not do it.  I could not do it though twenty million men were doing the same thing.  No, I could not do it any more than you could commit murder, father.  That is all.  Perhaps when those who survive from my company come home, after they have been beaten as they will be—­’”

“What!” Westerling exploded.

All the force of his being had to take umbrage at this.  Beaten!  Marta saw the rigid, unyielding Westerling who had cried, “We shall win!” when she made her second prophecy.  But the comparison did not occur to him.  Nothing occurred to him but red anger, until the first dart of reason warned him, a chief of staff, that a private had made him completely lose his temper.  He recovered his poise with a laugh and without even glancing at Marta.

“Well, we might as well hear the reasons for your expert opinion,” he said, his satire a trifle hoarse after the strain of his emotion.

“Because the Browns fight for their homes!” answered Hugo “When the great crisis comes they have a reserve strength that we have not:  conscience, the intelligent conscience of this age that cannot fool itself with false enthusiasm continually.  They are fighting as I should pray that I might fight if the Browns invaded our country; as I might fight against a murderous burglar.  For I will fight, sir, I will fight with my face to the white posts, but not with my back to them!  The Browns have no more right to cross our frontier than we have to cross theirs!”

There was a perceptible shudder on Marta’s part, an abrupt, tossing elevation of her head.  She stared at the spot where Dellarme had lain in the garden.  Dellarme’s smile was back on her lips; it seemed graven there.  Her eyes, which Westerling could not see, were leaping flames.

“I’m afraid you will not have the chance,” Westerling observed, as he returned the letter to Hugo, its reading unfinished.  “What if every man held your views?  What would become of the army and the nation?” he demanded.