“Isn’t there something else I can do to help with the wounded?” Marta asked.  She longed for action in order to escape her thoughts.

“You’ve had a terrible shock—­when you are stronger,” said the doctor.

“When you have had something to eat and drink,” observed the practical Minna authoritatively.

Marta would not have the food brought to her.  She insisted that she was strong enough to accompany Minna to the tower.  While Minna urged mouthfuls down Marta’s dry throat as she sat outside the door of the sitting-room with her mother a number of weary, dust-streaked faces, with feverish energy in their eyes, peered over the hedge that bounded the garden on the side toward the pass.  These scout skirmishers of Stransky’s men of the 53d Regiment of the Browns made beckoning gestures as to a crowd, before they sprang over the hedge and ran swiftly, watchfully, toward the linden stumps, closely followed by their comrades.  Soon the whole garden was overrun by the lean, businesslike fellows, their glances all ferret-like to the front.

“Look, Minna!” exclaimed Marta.  “The giant who carried the old man in pickaback the first night of the war!”

“Yes, the bold impudence of him!” said Minna.  “As if there was nothing that could stand in his way and what he wanted he would have!”

But Minna was flushing as she spoke.  The flush dissipated and she drew up her chin when Stransky, looking around, recognized her with a merry, confident wave of his hand.

“See, he’s a captain and he wears an iron cross!” said Marta as Stransky hastened toward them.

“He acts like it!” assented Minna grudgingly.

Eager, leviathan, his cap doffed with a sweeping gesture as he made a low bow, Stransky was the very spirit of retributive victory returning to claim the ground that he had lost.

“Well, this is like getting home again!” he cried.

“So I see!” said Minna equivocally.

Stransky drew his eyes together, sighting them on the bridge of his nose thoughtfully at this dubious reception.

“I came back for the chance to kiss a good woman’s hand,” he observed with a profound awkwardness and looking at Minna’s hand.  “Your hand!” he added, the cast in his eyes straightening as he looked directly at her appealingly.

She extended her finger-tips and he pressed his lips to them.  Then she drew back a step, a trifle pale, her eyes sad and questioning, more than ever Madonna-like, and curled her arm around little Clarissa Eileen, who had stolen to her mother’s side.

“What is that?” asked Clarissa Eileen, pointing to the cross on Stransky’s breast.

“That,” observed Stransky deliberately, “is a little piece of metal that I got for an inspiration of manhood.  It doesn’t cost the price of a day’s rations, but it’s one of the things which money can’t buy—­not yet—­in this commercial age.  One of those institutions of barbarism that we anarchists call government gave it to me, and I’ll never part with it!”