Nature was in a gracious humor, the very tree tops motionless.  The rich landscape in Sunday quiet appealed to his affections.  He loved his country and he loved Marta.  It had been on such a day as this when there would be no danger, that he had taken her for her first flight.  The glimpses, as they flew, of her profile, so alive and tense, were fresh to his eye.  How serious she had been!  How vivid her impressions!  How tempestuous her ideas!  He recalled their talk upon their return; all his questions and her answers.

* * * * *

“Sublime and ridiculous!” she had begun in a summing up.  “It is like seeing the life of a family through a glass roof—­the big, universal family!  Valleys seemed no larger than sauce-dishes on a table.”

“What was the sublime thing?”

“Man’s toil!  The cumulative result of it, on every hand, in the common aim for food, comfort, happiness, and progress!  Little details of difference disappeared.  Towns, villages, houses were simply towns, villages, houses of any country.”

“And the supremely ridiculous thing?”

“A regiment of cavalry of the Grays and one of the Browns on the same road!  They appeared so self-important, as if the sky would fall or the earth heave up to meet the sky if they got out of formation.  I imagined each man a metal figure that fitted astride a metal horse of the kind that comes to children at Christmas time.  They might better be engaged in brass-ring-snatching contests at the merry-go-rounds of public fairs.  I wanted to brush them all over with a wave of the hand as you might the battalions of the nursery floor.  Just drilling and drilling in order to slash at one another some day.  Flight! flight!  It makes one’s mind as big and broad as the world.  Oh, what a wonderful talk I’ll have for my kids next Sunday!”

* * * * *

Now that Lanstron was the organizer of the aviation corps his own flights were rare.  Mostly they were made to La Tir.  His visits to Marta were his holidays?  All the time that she was absent on her journey around the world they had corresponded.  Her letters, so revealing of herself and her peculiar angles of observation, formed a bundle sacredly preserved.  Her mother’s joking reference about her girlish resolution not to marry a soldier often recurred to him.  There, he sometimes thought, was the real obstacle to his great desire.

He wished, this morning, that he were not Colonel Lanstron, but the bridge-builder returning from his triumph after he had at last spanned the chasm and controlled the floods.  Ah, there was something like romance and real accomplishment in that!  What an easy time a bridge-builder had, comparatively, too!  What an easy master capital must be compared to Eugene Partow!  But no!  If Marta loved it would not matter whether he were bridge builder or army builder.  Yes, she was like that.  And what right had he to think of marriage?  He could not have any home.  He was now in the capital; again, along the frontier—­a vagabond of duty and Partow’s orders.