“I’m deaf—­stone deaf, if you please!” he wheezed in senile fashion.

She had to laugh and he laughed, too, with the ringing tone of youth that made him seem younger than his years.

“Not a gardener—­a colonel of artillery, in the uniform, under the flag again, thanks to you!” he cried.  “An officer once more!”

“I’m glad!” she exclaimed.  Here was one thing more to the credit of war.

“Thanks to you, instead of being shot as a spy—­thanks to you!” More than the emotion of the brimming gratitude of his heart shone through his mobile features.

“It was your choice; you improved it.  You fulfilled a faith that I had in you,” she said.

“Faith in me!  That is the finest tribute of all—­better than this, better than this!” He touched the iron cross on his coat as Stransky had to Minna.

“And I took your place,” said Marta with a dull, slow emphasis.

Yes, he did owe much to her, she was thinking.  In his place she had lied; his part she had played in shame and no future act, she felt, could ever expiate it.  The teacher of peace, she had become the partisan of war in wicked cunning.

He guessed nothing of what lay behind her words.  He had forgotten her children’s school.

“And did my work better than I could!  You are wonderful, wonderful!” He was aglow with admiration, with awe, with adoration.

She smiled faintly, bitterly, while he burst into a flood of talk.

“I was back with the guns you had given me when I heard that you were taking my place.  Then I thought, can I be worthy of this—­of what you have done for me, giving me back my own world, your world?  I vowed I would be worthy—­worthy of you.  Heavens!  How I made the guns play—­bang-bang-bang!” He cupped his bands over his eyes as an imaginary range-finder, sweeping the field.  “Oh, they are beautiful guns, these new models!  With a battalion I won a regiment.  I asked Lanny to tell you; did he?”

“Yes, and also of the iron cross.”

“A fine bit of metal, the cross, and they have not been giving them too promiscuously, either,” said Feller.  “But they’re not gun-metal!  That is the real metal.  It was my guns that closed the gate to the pass,” he went on, swept by the flood of enthusiasm.  “I didn’t open fire till I could concentrate so as to make a solidly locked gate.  I tell you, the guns are the thing!  You ought to have seen that retreat curl up on itself.  And where the shells struck on the hard road—­phew!  They lifted the Grays upward to meet shrapnel pounding them from the sky!  We could have torn the whole Column to pieces if they hadn’t surrendered.  What a bag of rifles and guns and stores is going to our capital!  Oh, our friends the Grays were a little too fast!  They didn’t know what the guns meant in defence.  The guns—­they are back to their old place of glory!  They rule!”

“Was it your guns that fired into the melee there by the gate?” Marta asked.