“I come with the question which I had sealed in my lonely heart,” he was saying, “while I lived a lie and trimmed rose-bushes and hung on your words.  You saved me.  I fought for you.  You were in my eyes, in my angers, in my brain as I directed the fire of my guns.  ’She will be pleased to hear that I am a colonel!’ I kept thinking.  I love you!  I love you!”

Marta started up from her chair, her eyes moist and open wide, amazed, but growing kind and troubled.  Had she been guilty of giving him hope?  Was there something in her that had led him on, a shame that came natural to her since she had let Westerling proceed with his love?  Her guilt in Feller’s case was worse than in Westerling’s.  A thousand Westerlings were not worth one Feller.  And he had been near her, near as a comrade, in imagination, with his ready suggestions of how to play her part in its most exacting moments!  While he stood, the picture of the eager, impatient lover trembling for an answer that seemed to mean heaven or perdition for him, the kindness that went with the trouble in her eyes warmed to fondness, as she laid her fingers on his shoulder.

“You would want me to love you, wouldn’t you?” she asked gently.  “And if I cannot?  Yes, if I can neither act nor play at love, so real must love be to me?”

He turned miserable, with eyes seeming to sink into his head, and body to wilt in the dejection of that pitiful, hopeless attitude when his secret had been discovered in the tower sitting-room.

“Act!  Act!” he murmured.

“Yes.”  Her fingers exercised the faintest pressure on his shoulder.  “Your true love, your one enduring love, is the guns.  All other loves come and go.  To-morrow, if not, next day, in this big, throbbing world, with your future assured, as you lived other great moments you would look back on this moment as another part that you had acted—­and so beautifully acted.”

“Act!  Act!” he repeated, like one who is coming to grip with facts.

For a period he stared at the ground before he reached for the hand on his shoulder, which he pressed in both of his, looking soberly into her eyes.  He smiled; smiled apparently at a memory, let her hand drop, and raised his own hands, palms out, in a gesture of good-humored comprehension.

“You know me!” he exclaimed.  “But I did it well, didn’t I?” he asked, after a pause.

“Beautifully.  I repeat, it was convincingly real,” she replied, laughing in relief.

“If I hadn’t, it would have been most disappointing after all my rehearsals,” he went on.  “Yes, you know me!  Why, I might have been wanting to break the engagement in a week because I was beginning other rehearsals!” He laughed, too, as if relishing the prospect.  “Yes, I act—­act always, except with the guns.  They alone are real!” he burst out in joyous fury.  “We are going on, I and my guns, on to the best yet—­on in the pursuit!  Nothing can stop us!  We shall hit the Grays so fast and hard that they can never get their machine in order again.  God bless you!  Everything that is fine in me will always think finely of you!  You and Lanny—­two fixed stars for me!”