"And with an indemnity that will stagger the world!"
"Nothing is impossible with Lanstron. How he has worked it out—baited them to their own destruction!"
"A frontier of our own choosing!"
"On the next range. We will keep all that stretch of plain there!"
"And the river, too!"
"They shall pay—pay for attacking us!"
Pay, pay for the drudgery, the sleepless nights, the dead and the wounded—for our dead and wounded! No matter about theirs! The officers were too intent in their elation to observe a young woman, standing quite still, her lips a thin line and a deep blaze in her eyes as she looked this way and that at the field of faces, seeking some dissentient, some partisan of the right. She was seeing the truth now; the cold truth, the old truth to which she had been untrue when she took Feller's place. There could be no choice of sides in war unless you believed in war. One who fought for peace must take up arms against all armies. Her part as a spy appeared to her clad in a new kind of shame: the desertion of her principles.
Nor did the officers observe a man of thirty-five, wearing the cords of the staff and a general's stars, coming around the corner of the house. Marta's feverish, roving glance had noted him directly he was in sight. His face seemed to be in keeping with the other faces, in the ardor of a hunt unfinished; hand in blouse pocket, his bearing a little too easy to be conventionally military—the same Lanny.
She was dimly conscious of surprise not to find him changed, perhaps because he was unaccompanied by a retinue or any other symbol of his power. He might have been coming to call on a Sunday afternoon. In that first glimpse it was difficult to think of him as the commander of an army. But that he was, she must not forget. She was shaken and trembling; and a mist rose before her, so that she did not see him clearly when, with a gesture of relief, he saw her.
"Lanstron!" exclaimed an officer in the first explosive breath of amazement on recognizing him; then added: "His Excellency, the chief of staff!"