“I had to tell you what I felt, sir,” said Hugo.  “Thank you for letting me live, after you knew.”

He saluted and turned away.  Marta and Westerling watched him as he hobbled around the corner of the house and in a heavy silence listened to the crunch of his crutch tips on the gravel growing fainter.  Her lashes, those convenient curtains for hiding thought, dropped as Westerling looked around; but he saw that her lips had reddened and that she was drawing a long, deep, energizing breath.  When the lashes lifted, there was still wonder in her eyes—­wonder which had become definite tribute to him.  The assurance he wanted was that he had borne himself well, and he had it.

“You kept your patience beautifully,” she told him.  “It seems to me that you were both kind and wise.”

“How I was to be merciful against the facts puzzled me,” he replied, “until you saved the day with your suggestion of psychological irresponsibility.”

“Then I helped?  I really helped?”

“You did, decidedly!  You—­” There he broke off, for he found himself speaking to her profile.

She had looked away in a sudden flight of abstraction, very far away, where the lowering sun was stretching the shadows of the foot-hills toward the white posts.  Capes and pillars and promontories of shadow there in the distance!  Swinging, furry finger-points of shadow from the tall hollyhocks in the garden swaying with the breeze!  The dark shade of the house’s mass over the yard!

It was time for him to be at his desk.  But she seemed far from any suggestion of going.  She seemed to expect him to wait; otherwise he might have concluded that she had forgotten his presence.  Yet were he to rustle a paper he knew that she would hear it.  Though she did not change her position in the chair, she appeared subtly active in every fibre.

He found waiting easy, free as he was to watch the beauty of her profile in the glory of the sunset.  The superb thing about her was that she always called for study.  Her lips moved in sensitive turns; her breast rose in soft billows with her breaths; the long, flickering eyelashes ran outward from black to bronze and to feather tips of gold.  In time measured by the regular standard of clock ticks, which in the brain may either race madly or drag mercilessly, she was not long silent.  When she spoke she’ did not look entirely around at first; he had no glimpse into her eyes.

“It was another experience of war,” she said moodily, returning to the subject of Hugo.  “Yes, something like the final chapter of experience, the trial of this dreamer.”  Then a wave of restless impatience with her abstraction swept over her.  Speaking of dreamers, she herself would stop dreaming.  “For experience does make a great difference, doesn’t it?” she exclaimed with a sad, knowing smile.  After a perceptible pause her eyes suddenly glowed into his.  All the commotion of her thought was galvanized into purpose in the look.  “I have had a heart full and a mind full of experiences!” she said.  “I have been close to war—­closer than you!  I have looked on while others fought!”