At the time he had not chosen any employment for Feller.  He was thinking only that something must be found.  When he heard of the death of the Gallands’ gardener he recollected that before the passion for gambling overtook Feller he had still another passion besides his guns.  The garden of the Feller estate had been famous in its neighborhood.  Young Lanstron had not been more fond of the society of an engine-driver than young Feller of a gardener’s.  On a holiday in the capital with his fellow cadets he would separate from them to spend hours in the botanical gardens.  Once, after his downfall began, at a riotous dinner party he had broken into a temper with a man who had torn a rose to pieces in order to toss the petals over the table.

“Flowers have souls!” he had cried in one of his tumultuous, abandoned reversions to his better self which his companions found eccentric and diverting.  “That rose is the only thing in the room that is not foul —­and I am the foulest of all!”

The next minute, perhaps after another glass of champagne, he would be winning a burst of laughter by his mimicry of a gouty old colonel reprimanding him for his erring career.

Naturally, in the instinct of friendship, Lanstron’s own account left out the unpleasant and dwelt on the pleasant facts of Feller’s career.

“His colonel did not understand him,” he said.  “But I knew the depths of his fine spirit and generous heart.  I knew his talent.  I knew that he was a victim of unsympathetic surroundings, of wealth, of love of excitement, and his own talent.  Where he was, something must happen.  He bubbled with energy.  The routine of drill, the same old chaff of the mess, the garrison gossip, the long hours of idleness while the busy world throbs outside, which form a privileged life to most officers, were stifling to him.  ‘Let’s set things going!’ he would say in the old days, and we’d set them.  Most of our demerits were for some kind of deviltry.  And how he loved the guns!  I can see the sparkle of his men’s eyes at sight of him.  Nobody could get out of them what he could.  If he had not been put in the army as a matter of family custom, if he had been an actor, or if he and I had gone to build bridges, then he might have a line of capital letters and periods after his name, and he would not be a spy or I an employer of spies, doing the work of a detective agency in an officer’s uniform because nobody but an officer may do it.”

At first Marta listened rigidly, but as the narrative proceeded her interest grew.  When Lanstron quoted Feller’s appeal for any task, however mean and thankless, she nodded sympathetically and understandingly; when he related the incident of the rose, its appeal was irresistible.  She gave a start of delight and broke silence.

“Yes.  I recall just how he looked as he stood on the porch, his head bent, his shoulders stooped, twirling his hat in his hands, while mother and I examined him as to his qualifications,” she said.  “I remember his words.  He said that he knew flowers and that, like him, flowers could not hear; but perhaps he would be all the better gardener because he could not hear.  He was so ingratiating; yet his deafness seemed such a drawback that I hesitated.”