“I think you had better stop her if you can,” said the general to his aide.

The aide overtook her at the gate.

“We shall know about His Excellency before you can find out for yourself,” he said; and, young himself, he could put the sympathy of youth with romance into his tone.  “You might miss the road, even miss him, when he was without a scratch, and be for hours in ignorance,” he explained.  “In a few minutes we ought to have word.”

Marta sank down weakly on the tongue of a wagon, overturned against the garden wall in the melee of the retreat, and leaned her shoulder on the wheel for support.

“If the women of the Grays waited four weeks,” she said with an effort at stoicism, “then I ought to be able to wait a few minutes.”

“Depend on me.  I’ll bring news as soon as there is any,” the aide concluded, and, seeing that she wished to be alone, he left her.

For the first time she had real oblivion from the memory of her deceit of Westerling, the oblivion of drear, heart-pulling suspense.  All the good times, the sweetly companionable times, she and Lanny had had together; all his flashes of courtship, his outburst in their last interview in the arbor, when she had told him that if she found that she wanted to come to him she would come in a flame, passed in review under the hard light of her petty ironies and sarcasms, which had the false ring of coquetry to her now, genuine as they had been at the time.  Through her varying moods she had really loved him, and the thing that had slumbered in her became the drier fuel for the flame—­perhaps too late.

Her thought, her feeling was as if he were not chief of staff, but a private soldier, and she were not a woman who had girdled the world and puckered her brow over the solution of problems, but a provincial girl who had never been outside her village—­his sweetheart.  All questions of the army following up its victory, of his responsibilities and her fears that he would go on with conquest, faded into the fact of life—­his life, as the most precious thing in the world to her.  For him, yes, for him she had played the spy, as that village girl would for her lover, thinking of warm embraces; for him she had kept steady under the strain.

Without him—­what then?  It seemed that the fatality that had let him escape miraculously from the aeroplane accident, made him chief of staff, and brought him victory, might well choose to ring down the curtain of destiny for him in the charge that drove the last foot of the invader off the soil of the Browns....  A voice was calling....  She heard it hazily, with a sudden access of giddy fear, before it became a cheerful, clarion cry that seemed to be repeating a message that had already been spoken without her understanding it.

“He’s safe, safe, safe, Miss Galland!  He was not hit!  He is on his way back and ought to be here very soon!”

She heard herself saying “Thank you!” But that was not for some time.  The aide was already gone.  He had had his thanks in the effect of the news, which made him think that a chief of staff should not receive congratulations for victory alone.