“Marta—­that bandage!  You have been hurt?” he exclaimed.

Unlike Feller, he had not been so obsessed with a purpose as to be blind to externals.  Her hostile mood was quick to recall that no smallest detail of anything under his sight ever escaped him.  This was his kind of strength—­the strength that had wrecked Westerling as a fine, intellectual process.  He could act, too.  In the tone of the question, “You’ve been hurt?” without tragic emphasis, was a twitching, throbbing undercurrent of horror, which set the hand hidden in the pocket of his blouse quivering.  Why care if she were hurt?  Why not think about the hundreds of thousands of others who were wounded.  Why not care for that poor fellow whose ghastly wound kept staring at her as he wrote “Kill me!” on the wagon body?

“It’s the fashion to be wounded,” she said, eyebrows lifted and lashes lowered, with a nervous smile.  “I played Florence Nightingale, the natural woman’s part, I believe.  We should never protest; only nurse the victims of war.  After helping to send men to death I went under fire myself, and—­and that helped.”

She could be kind to Feller but not to Lanstron.  He was not a child.  He was Lanny, who, as she thought of him now, did nothing except by calculation.

“Yes, that would help,” he agreed, wincing as from a knife thrust.

Her old taunt:  sending men to death and taking no risk himself!  She saw that he winced; she realized that she had stayed words that were about to come in a flood.  Then she seemed to see him through new lenses.  He appeared drawn and pale and old, as if he, too, had become ashes; anything but the conqueror.  Her feelings grew contradictory.  Why all this fencing?  How weak, how silly!  She had much to say to him—­a last appeal to make.  Her throat held a dry lump.  She was marshalling her thoughts to begin when the brittle silence was broken by a rumbling of voices, a stirring of feet, and a cheer.

“Lanstron!  Lanstron!  Hurrah for Lanstron!”

The soldiers in the garden did not bother with any “Your Excellency, the chief of staff” formula when word had been passed of his presence.  Marta looked around to see their tempestuous enthusiasm as they tossed their caps in the air and sent up their spontaneous tribute from the depths of their lungs.  Conqueror and hero to the living, but the dead could not speak, whispered some fiend in her heart.

Lanstron uncovered to the demonstration impulsively, when the conventional military acknowledgment would have been a salute.  He always looked more like the real Lanny to her with his forehead bare.  It completed the ensemble of his sensitive features.  She saw that he was blinking almost boyishly at the compliment and noted the little deprecatory shake of his head, as much as to say that they were making a mistake.

“Thank you!” he called, and the cheeriness of his voice, she thought, expressed his real self; the delight of victory and the glowing anticipation of further victories.