“Truly!” She was radiant.  “Truly?” she asked wistfully.

“Yes, yes—­a yes as real as the guns!”

“Then it helps!  Oh, how it helps!” she murmured almost inaudibly.

“Good-by!  God bless you!” he cried as he started to go, adding over his shoulder merrily:  “I’ll send you a picture post-card from the Grays’ capital of my guns parked in the palace square.”

She watched him leap the garden wall as lightly as he had come and gallop away, an impersonation of the gay, adventurous spirit of war, counting death and wounds and hardship as the delights of the gamble.  Yes, he would follow the Grays, throwing shells in the irresponsible joy of tossing confetti in a carnival.  Pursuit!  Was Feller’s the sentiment of the army?  Were the Browns not to stop at the frontier?  Were they to change their song to, “Now we have ours we shall take some of theirs”?  The thought was fresh fuel to the live coals that still remained under the ashes.

A brigade commander and some of his staff-officers near by formed a group with faces intent around an operator who was attaching his instrument to a field-wire that had just been reeled over the hedge.  Marta moved toward them, but paused on hearing an outburst of jubilant exclamations: 

“A hundred thousand prisoners!”

“And five hundred guns!”

“We’re closing in on their frontier all along the line!”

“It’s incredible!”

“But the word is official—­it’s right!”

From mouth to mouth—­a hundred thousand prisoners, five hundred guns—­the news was passed in the garden.  Eyes dull with fatigue began flashing as the soldiers broke into a cheer that was not led, a cheer unlike any Marta had heard before.  It had the high notes of men who were weary, of a terrible exultation, of spirit stronger than tired legs and as yet unsatisfied.  Other exclamations from both officers and men expressed a hunger whetted by the taste of one day’s victory.

“We’ll go on!”

“We’ll make peace in their capital!”

“And with an indemnity that will stagger the world!”

“Nothing is impossible with Lanstron.  How he has worked it out—­baited them to their own destruction!”

“A frontier of our own choosing!”

“On the next range.  We will keep all that stretch of plain there!”

“And the river, too!”

“They shall pay—­pay for attacking us!”

Pay, pay for the drudgery, the sleepless nights, the dead and the wounded—­for our dead and wounded!  No matter about theirs!  The officers were too intent in their elation to observe a young woman, standing quite still, her lips a thin line and a deep blaze in her eyes as she looked this way and that at the field of faces, seeking some dissentient, some partisan of the right.  She was seeing the truth now; the cold truth, the old truth to which she had been untrue when she took Feller’s place.  There could be no choice of sides in war unless you believed in war.  One who fought for peace must take up arms against all armies.  Her part as a spy appeared to her clad in a new kind of shame:  the desertion of her principles.