Stone axe, spear and bow, javelin and broadsword, blunderbuss and creaking cannon—­all the weapons of all stages in the art of war—­had gone trooping past.  Now had come the speck in the sky, straight on, like some projectile born of the ether.

“Beside the old baron, we are parvenus,” Marta would say.  “And what a parvenu the baron would have been to the Roman aristocrat!”

“Our family is old enough—­none older in the province!” Mrs. Galland would reply.  “Marta, how your mind does wander!  I’d get a headache just contemplating the things you are able to think of in five minutes.”

The first Galland had built a house on the land that his king had given him for one of the most brilliant feats of arms in the history of the pass.  He had the advantage of the baron in that he could read and write, though with difficulty.  Marta had an idea that he was not presentable at a tea-table; however, he must have been more so than the baron, who, she guessed, would have grabbed all the cakes on the plate as a sheer matter of habit in taking what he wanted unless a stronger than he interfered.

Even the tower, raised to the glory of an older family whose descendants, if any survived, were unaware of their lineage, had become known as the Galland tower.  The Gallands were rooted in the soil of the frontier; they were used to having war’s hot breath blow past their door; they were at home in the language and customs of two peoples; theirs was a peculiar tradition, which Marta had absorbed with her first breath.  Every detail of her circumscribed existence reminded her that she was a Galland.

Town and plain and range were the first vista of landscape that she had seen; doubtless they would be the last.  Meanwhile, there was the horizon.  She was particularly fond of looking at it.  If you are seventeen, with a fanciful mind, you can find much information not in histories or encyclopaedias or the curricula of schools in the horizon.

There she had learned that the Roman aristocrat had turned his thumb down to a lot of barbarian captives because he had a fit of indigestion, and the next day, when his digestion was better, he had scattered coins among barbarian children; that Napoleon, who had also gone over the pass road, was a pompous, fat little man, who did not always wipe his upper lip clean of snuff when he was on a campaign; that the baron’s youngest daughter had lost her eyesight from a bodkin thrust for telling her sister, who had her father’s temper, that she was developing a double chin.

For the people of Maria’s visions were humanly real to her, and as such she liked and understood them.  If the first Galland were half a robber, to disguise the fact because he was her ancestor was not playing fair.  It made him only a lay figure of romance.