“Not this kind of fighting, Marta,” he proceeded very soberly.  “Other wars are no criterion for this.  I know about the defences of the tangent because I helped to plan them.  In order to keep the enemy in ignorance we have made no permanent fortifications.  But the engineers and the material will be ready, instantly the frontier is closed to intelligence, to construct defences suited to a delaying and punishing action.  Every human being will be subject to martial law; every resource at military command.  Every hill, house, ditch, and tree will be used as cover or protection and will be subject to attack.”

Not argument this, but the marshalling of facts of the kind in which he dealt as unanswerable evidence, while she listened with a still face and dilating eyes that did not look at him until he had finished.  Then a smile came, a faint, drawn smile of irony, and her eyes staring into his were chilling and greenish-black in their anger.

“And the house of a friend meant nothing!  It was only fuel for the hell you devise!” she said, making each word count like shot singing over glare ice.

“It is only fair to myself to say that when I laid the sheets of my map before Partow I had excluded your house and grounds,” he pleaded in defence.  “His thumb pounced on that telltale blank space.  ’A key-point!  So this is your tendon of Achilles, eh?’ he said in his blunt fashion.”

“The blunt fashion is admired by soldiers,” she replied without softening.  “Yes, he could play chess with heaps of bodies!  He is worse than Westerling!”

“No, he would use his own premises, his brother’s, his father’s if it would help.  Well, then he took a pen and filled in the blank space with the detail which is to make your house and garden the centre of an inferno.”

“How Christian!” breathed Marta.  “I suppose he loves his grandchildren and that they are taught the Lord’s prayer!”

“I believe his only pastime is playing with them,” admitted Lanstron, stumbling on, trying to be loyal to Partow, to duty, to country, no longer calm or dispassionate, but demoralized under the lash.  “He tells them that when they are grown he hopes there will be an end of war.”

“Worse yet—­a hypocrite!”

“But, Marta, I never knew a man more sincere.  He is working to the same end as you—­peace.  If the Grays would play with fire he would give them such a burning that they will never try again.  He would make war too horrible for practice; fix the frontier forever where by, right it belongs; make conquest by one civilized nation of another impossible hereafter.  Yes, when it is stalemate, when it is proved that the science of modern defence has made the weak so strong that superior numbers cannot play the bully, then shall we have peace in practice!”

“My children’s prayer and Partow in the same gallery!” she laughed stonily.  “The peace of armament, not of man’s superiority to the tiger and the tarantula!  And you say it all so calmly.  You picture the hell of your manufacture as coolly as if it were some fairies’ dance!”