One or two afternoons a week Colonel Hedworth Westerling, commander of the regimental post of the Grays on the other side of the white posts, stretched his privilege of crossing the frontier and appeared for tea at the Gallands’.  It meant a pleasant half-hour breaking a long walk, a relief from garrison surroundings.  Favored in mind and person, favored in high places, he had become a colonel at thirty-two.  People with fixed ideas as to the appearance of a soldier said that he looked every inch the commander.  He was tall, strong-built, his deep, broad chest suggesting powerful energy.  Conscious of his abilities, it was not without reason that he thought well of himself, in view of the order, received that morning, which was to make this a farewell call.

He had found Mrs. Galland an agreeable reflection of an aristocratic past.  The daughter had what he defined vaguely as girlish piquancy.  He found it amusing to try to answer her unusual questions; he liked the variety of her inventive mind, with its flashes of downright matter-of-factness.

Ascending the steps with his firm, regular tread, he suggested poise and confidence and, perhaps, vanity also in his fastidious dress.  As Marta’s slight, immature figure came to the edge of the veranda, he wondered what she would be like five years later, when she would be twenty-two and a woman.  It was unlikely that he would ever know, or that in a month he would care to know.  He would pass on; his rank would keep him from returning to South La Tir, which was a colonel’s billet except in time of war.

Not until tea was served did he mention his new assignment; he was going to the general staff at the capital.  Mrs. Galland murmured her congratulations in conventional fashion.

“Into the very holy of holies of the great war machine, isn’t it?” Marta asked.

“Yes—­yes, exactly!” he replied.

Her chair was drawn back from the table.  She leaned forward in a favorite position of hers when she was intensely interested, with hands clasped over her knee, which her mother always found aggravatingly tomboyish.  She had a mass of lustrous black hair and a mouth rather large in repose, but capable of changing curves of emotion.  Her large, dark eyes, luminously deep under long lashes, if not the rest of her face, had beauty.  Her head was bent, the lashes forming a line with her brow now, and her eyes had the still flame of wonder that they had when she was looking all around a thing and through it to find what it meant.  Westerling knew by the signs that she was going to break out with one of her visions, rather than one of her whimsical ideas.  She was seeing the Roman general, the baron, the first Galland, and the fat, pompous little man, no less in the life than Hedworth Westerling.  She had fused them into one.

“Some day you will be chief of staff, the head of the Gray army!” she suddenly exclaimed.

Westerling started as if he had been surprised in a secret.  Then he flushed slightly.