Lanstron continued to read to the amazed staff, for Partow’s message had looked far into the future.  Then there was a P.S., written after the war had begun, on the evening of the day that Marta had gone from tea on the veranda with Westerling to the telephone, in the impulse of her new purpose.

“I begin to believe in that dream,” he wrote.  “I begin to believe that the chance for the offensive will come, now that my colleague, Miss Galland, in the name of peace has turned practical.  There is nothing like mixing a little practice in your dreams while the world is still well this side of Utopia, as the head on my old behemoth of a body well knows.  She had the right idea with her school.  The oath so completely expressed my ideas—­the result of all my thinking—­that I had a twinge of literary jealousy.  My boy, if you do reach the frontier, in pursuit of a broken army, and you do not keep faith with my dream and with her ideals, then you will get a lesson that will last you forever at the foot of the Gray range.  But I do not think so badly as that of you or of my judgment of men.”

“Lanny!  Lanny!”

The dignity of a staff council could not restrain Marta.  Her emotion must have action.  She sprang to his side and seized his hand, her exultation mixed with penitence over the why she had wronged him and Partow.  Their self-contained purpose had been the same as hers and they had worked with a soldier’s fortitude, while she had worked with whims and impulses.  She bent over him with gratitude and praise and a plea for forgiveness in her eyes, submerging the thing which he sought in them.  He flushed boyishly in happy embarrassment, incapable of words for an instant; and silently the staff looked on.

“And I agree with Partow,” Lanstron went on, “that we cannot take the range.  The Grays still have numbers equal to ours.  It is they, now, who will be singing ‘God with us!’ with their backs against the wall.  With Partow’s goes my own appeal to the army and the nation; and I shall keep faith with Partow, with Miss Galland, and with my own ideas, if the government orders the army to advance, by resigning as chief of staff—­my work finished.”

Westerling and his aide and valet, inquiring their way as strangers, found the new staff headquarters of the Grays established in an army building, where Bouchard had been assigned to trivial duties, back of the Gray range.  As their former chief entered a room in the disorder of maps and packing-cases, the staff-officers rose from their work to stand at salute like stone images, in respect to a field-marshal’s rank.  There was no word of greeting but a telling silence before Turcas spoke.  His voice had lost its parchment crinkle and become natural.  The blue veins on his bulging temples were a little more pronounced, his thin features a little more pinched, but otherwise he was unchanged and he seemed equal to another strain as heavy as the one he had undergone.