“My God!  That little girl—­there—­there!” Westerling exclaimed distractedly.

“Clarissa!  Clarissa!” cried Marta, seeing the child for the first time.

She started precipitately to the rescue, but a hand on her arm arrested her and she turned to see Hugo Mallin bound past her down the slope.  Still remaining on the premises under guard while Westerling had neglected to dispose of the case, he had the run of the grounds that morning while the staff was feverishly preparing for departure.

Marta watched him leaping from terrace to terrace.  Before he had reached Clarissa worse than shrapnel bursts happened.  The spatter of the fragments and bullets falling on either side of the road whipped the edges of the struggling human jam inward.  In the midst of this a percussion shell struck, bursting on contact with the road and spreading its own grist of death and the stones of the road in a fan-shaped, mowing swath.  Legs and bodies were thrown out as if driven centrifugally by a powerful breath, with Hugo lost in the smoke and dust of the weaving mass.  He came out of it bearing Clarissa in his arms, up the terrace steps.  To Marta, this was an isolated deed of saving life, of mercy in the midst of merciless slaughter; a parallel to that of Stransky bringing in Grandfather Fragini pickaback.

“Big fireworks!” said Clarissa Eileen as Hugo set her down in front of Marta, whose heart was in her eyes speaking its gratitude.

The artillery’s maceration of the human jam suddenly ceased; perhaps because the gunners had seen the Red Cross flag which a doctor had the presence of mind to wave.  Westerling turned from a sight worse to him than the killing—­that of the flowing retreat along the road pressing frantically over the dead and wounded in growing disorder for the cover of the town, and found himself face to face with the mask-like features of that malingerer who had told him on the veranda that the Grays could not win.  Gall flooded his brain.  In Hugo he recognized something kindred to the spirit that had set his army at flight, something tangible and personified; and through a mist of rage he saw Hugo smiling—­smiling as he had at times at the veranda court—­and saluting him as a superior officer.

“Now I am going to fight,” said Hugo, “if they try to cross the white posts; to fight with all the skill and courage I can command.  But not till then.  They are still in their own country and we are not in ours.  Then they, in the wrong, will attack and we, in the right, will defend—­and, God with us, we shall win.”

Thus a second time he had given to the prayer of Marta’s children the life of action.  She could imagine how steadfastly and exaltedly he would face the invader.

“Thank you, Miss Galland,” he said.  “And say good-by to your mother and Minna for me.”