“Yes.  I saw that soft target early.  They put up a Red Cross flag at first, but I soon realized that it wasn’t any dressing station; only stragglers; only the kind that run away without orders.  So I let them have it, for that’s the law of war, and the way they would give it to us and did, more than once.  But I took care that no shots were fired at the house, though if it had not been your house I’d have sent a shell or two on the chance that some of the Gray staff might still be there.  Then, after the surrender, I kept spanking that lot with intermittent shells till I was sure the Red Cross flag was justified.”

“The fire was very accurate, as I happen to know, for it wounded me,” said Marta.

So intent had he been in talking to his audience, to her eyes, that now for the first time he noticed the bandage on her forearm.  His impressionable features were as struck with alarm and horror at sight of the tiny red spot as if she had been in danger of immediate death.

“You—­you were down by the road?” he gasped.  “My guns were firing at you?  Why—­how?”

“Helping with the wounded.”

“The Gray wounded?”

“Yes.”

“Of course, you would—­with any wounded!” he cried.  “Splendid!  Like you!  It is not bad?  It does not pain you?”

He bent over the red spot, his lips very near it and twitching, all his volatile force melting into solicitude and his voice taut, as if he himself were suffering the anguish of a dozen wounds.

“Only a scratch.  Don’t worry about it!” she assured him soothingly, with a peculiar smile.

Now he made a gesture of amazement, catching at another thought that darted as a shooting star across his mind.

“Wonderful—­wounded!  Wonderful!  Was there ever such a woman?” he cried.  “No, I knew from the first there never was.  The minute the way was clear and I could be spared from my guns I came to you—­to you!  This time I come not as a deaf, cringing, watery-eyed old gardener”—­for an instant he was the gardener—­“but as one of your world, to which I was bred,” and his shoulders, rising, filled out his uniform in the grace of the commander of men in action.  “Destiny has played with us.  It sent a spy to your garden.  It put you in my place.  A strange service, ours—­yes, destiny is in it!”

“Yes,” she breathed painfully, his suggestion striking deep.

She was staring at the ground, her face very still.  Yes, it was he who had started the train of circumstances that had left her with a memory more tragic than the one that had whitened his hair.  His memory was already erased.  What could ever erase hers?  He had begun anew.  How could she ever begin anew?  The fact of this man talking of everything as destiny—­of the slaughter, the misery, as destiny—­was the worst mockery of all.  Yet he was true to himself.  His enjoyed facility of fervid expression, his boyishness, his gift of making the lived moment the greatest of his life, was the very gift she had craved to make her forget her yesterdays.  Only faintly did she hear his next outburst, until he came to the end.