“Yes, yes!” breathed Marta softly, arching her eyebrows a trifle as she would when looking all around and through a thing or when she found any one beating about the bush.  The little frown disappeared and she smiled understandingly.  “You know I’m not a perfect goose!” she added.  “Had you been made chief of staff in name, too, all the old generals would have been in the sulks and the young generals jealous,” she continued.  “The one way that you might have the power to exercise was by proxy.”

This downright frankness was another reflection of the old days before he was at the apex of the pyramid.  Now it was so unusual in his experience as to be almost a shock.  On the point of arguing, he caught a mischievous, delightful “Isn’t that so?” in her eyes, and replied: 

“Yes, I shouldn’t wonder if it were!”

Why shouldn’t he admit the truth to the one who had rung the bell of his secret ambition long ago by recognizing in him the ability to reach his goal?  He marvelled at her grasp of the situation.

“It wasn’t so very hard to say, was it?” she asked happily, in response to his smile.  Then, her gift of putting herself in another’s place, while she strove to look at things with his purpose and vision, in full play, she went on in a different tone, as much to herself as to him:  “You have labored to make yourself master of a mighty organization.  You did not care for the non-essentials.  You wanted the reality of shaping results.”

“Yes, the results, the power!” he exclaimed.

“Fifteen hundred regiments!” she continued thoughtfully, looking at a given point rather than at him.  “Every regiment a blade which you would bring to an even sharpness!  Every regiment a unit of a harmonious whole, knowing how to screen itself from fire and give fire as long as bidden, in answer to your will if war comes!  That is what you live and plan for, isn’t it?”

“Yes, exactly!  Yes, you have it!” he said.  His shoulders stiffened as he thrilled at seeing a picture of himself, as he wanted to see himself, done in bold strokes.  It assured him that not only had his own mind grown beyond what were to him the narrow associations of his old La Tir days, but that hers had grown, too.  “And you—­what have you been doing all these years?” he asked.

“Living the life of a woman on a country estate,” she replied.  “Since you made a rule that no Gray officers Should cross the frontier we have been a little lonelier, having only the Brown officers to tea.  Did you really find it so bad for discipline in your own case?” she concluded with playful solemnity.

“One cannot consider individual cases in a general order,” he explained.  “And, remember, the Browns made the ruling first.  You see, every year means a tightening—­yes, a tightening, as arms and armies grow more complicated and the maintaining of staff secrets more important.  And you have been all the time at La Tir, truly?” he asked, changing the subject.  He was convinced that she had acquired something that could not be gained on the outskirts of a provincial town.