"You were right," he said to Marta easily, pleasantly. "We did it—we did it—we took Bordir with a loss of only twenty thousand men!"
Only twenty thousand! Her revulsion at the bald statement was relieved by the memory of Lanny's word over the telephone after breakfast that the Browns had lost only five thousand. Four to one was a wide ratio, she was thinking.
"Then the end—then peace is so much the nearer?" she asked.
"Very much nearer!" he answered earnestly, as he dropped on the bench beside her.
He stretched his arms out on the back of the seat and the relaxed attitude, unusual with him, brought into relief a new trait of which she had been hitherto oblivious. The conqueror had become simply a companionable man. Though he was not sitting close to her, yet, as his eyes met hers, she had a desire to move away which she knew would be unwise to gratify. She was conscious of a certain softening charm, a magnetism that she had sometimes felt in the days when she first knew him. She realized, too, that then the charm had not been mixed with the indescribable, intimate quality that it held now.
"In the midst of congratulations after the position was taken last night," he declared, "I confess that I was thinking less of success than of its source." He bent on her a look that was warm with gratitude.
She lowered her lashes before it; before gratitude that made her part appear in a fresh angle of misery.
"There seems to be a kind of fatality about our relations," he went on. "I lay awake pondering it last night." His tone held more than gratitude. It had the elation of discovery.
"Look out! Look out, now!" Not only the voices of Lanny and Feller and Hugo warned her, but also those of her mother and Minna.
"He is going to make it harder than I ever guessed!" echoed her own thought, in a flutter of confusion.