"I'm afraid you will not have the chance," Westerling observed, as he returned the letter to Hugo, its reading unfinished. "What if every man held your views? What would become of the army and the nation?" he demanded.
"Why, I think I have made that plain," replied Hugo. He appeared no less weary than Westerling over continual beating of the air to no purpose. "We should retreat to our own soil, where we belong."
"And you are ready to be shot for that principle?"
The question was sharp and final.
"Yes, if being shot for what I did is dying for it—though I prefer to live for it!" said Hugo, still without any pose. He refused to play for a chapter in the future book of martyrs to peace. This was the irritating thing about him to a soldier, who deprecated all kinds of personal bravado and show as against the efficiency of the modern military machine, when men were supposed to respond to duty in the face of death as automatically as in any business requiring team-work, with an every-day smile like Hugo's on their lips.
"Then," Westerling began, and broke off abruptly. His eyes sought Marta.
The affair seemed to have worn on her nerves also. There was a distinctly appreciable effort at self-control in the slow way that she turned her head. The flame in her eyes was suddenly suffused in a liquid glance which slowly brightened with a suggestion.
"It is extraordinary!" she breathed. "Don't you think that the blow on his head and the fever afterward has something to do with it?"
Hugo answered for himself.
"My views are the same as they were before the blow and the act that brought the blow!" he said, with a slight cast of the eye toward Marta which intimated that he wanted no help from the deserter of the principles which she had professed to him previously.