“Yes,” said Westerling, “that—­that would explain it!”

“I have been told that when people go mad they always ascribe every injury done to them to the person who happens to have excited their dislike,” she mused.

“Which seems to have been the case here,” Westerling assented.  He did not know what else to say.

“It was the strain of war, wasn’t it?” Marta proceeded thoughtfully.  “I notice that all the staff-officers are showing it; that is,” she added on second thought, quite literally, as she regarded him for an instant of silence, “all except you.  You remain the same, calm and decisive.”  There she looked away with a flutter of her lashes, as if she were shamed at having allowed herself to be caught in open admiration of him.  “Look!  The last effulgence of rose!” she went on hurriedly about the sunset.  “Why shouldn’t we think of the sky as heaven, as Nirvana?  What better immortality than to be absorbed into that?”

“None!” he agreed, but he was looking at her rather than at the sky.  His pride was recovering its natural confidence in the infallibility of his judgment of human beings.  He was seeing his suspicions as ridiculous enough to convict him of a brain as disordered as Bouchard’s.

Marta was thinking that she had been skating on very thin ice and that she must go on skating till she broke through.  There was an exhilaration about it that she could not resist:  the exhilaration of risk and the control of her faculties, prompted by a purpose hypnotically compelling.  Both were silent, she watching the sky, he in anticipation and suspense.  The rose went violet and the shadows over the range deepened.

“The guns and the troops wait.  With darkness the music begins!” he said slowly, with a sort of stern fervor.

“The music—­the music!  He calls it music!” ran through Marta’s mind mockingly, but she did not open her lips.

“According to my plan—­and your plan!” he added.

“My plan—­my plan!” she thought.  Her plan that was to send men into a shambles!

“They wait, ready, every detail arranged,” he continued proudly.

The violet melted into an inky blue; silence, vast, heavy, prevailed—­silence where the millions lay on their arms.  Even the guns in the distance had ceased their echoing rumble.  He felt the power of her presence and of the moment.  It was she who had given the information that had enabled him to confound the scepticism of the staff by the easy taking of Bordir.  Through her he might repeat Bordir in a larger way at Engadir, proving his theories of frontal attack.  His courage of initiative would shine out against the background of his staff’s scepticism as a light to the world’s imagination.  The first great man in forty years; the genius of the new system of tactics to meet the demands of a new age as Napoleon had met those of his, Grant of his, and Von Moltke of his!  Engadir taken, and his place on Valhalla would be secure.