“Do you admire your work?”

The fact that he was well groomed and freshly shaven did not in any wise dissipate in her feminine mind his connection with this destruction.  He had never seen anything like the smile which went with the gesture.  Her eyes were two continuing and challenging flames.  Her chin was held high and steady, and the pallor of exhaustion, with the blackness of her hair-and eyes, made her strangely commanding.  He understood that she was not waiting for him to speak, but to go.

“I did not know that there was a woman here!” he said.

“And I did not know that officers of the Grays were accustomed to enter private houses without invitations!” she replied.

“This is a little different,” he began.

She interrupted him.

“But the law of the Grays is that homes should be left undisturbed, isn’t it?  At least, it is the law of civilization.  I believe you profess, too, to protect property, do you not?”

“Why, yes!” he agreed.  He wished that he could get a little respite from the steady fire of her eyes.  It was embarrassing and as confusing as the white light of an impracticable logic.

“In that case, please place a guard around our house lest some more of your soldiers get out of control,” she went on.

“I can do that, yes,” he said.  “But we are to make this a staff headquarters and must start at once to put the house in readiness.”

“General Westerling’s headquarters?” she inquired.

He parried the question with a frown.  Staff-officers never give information.  They receive information and transmit orders.

“I know General Westerling.  You will tell him that my mother, Mrs. Galland, and our maid and myself are very tired from the entertainment he has given us, unasked, and we need sleep to-night.  So you will leave us until morning and that door, sir, is the one out into the grounds.”

The staff-officer bowed and went out by that door, glad to get away from Marta’s eyes.  His inspection of the premises with a view to plans for staff accommodation could wait.  Westerling would not be here for two days at least.

“Whew!  What energy she has!” he thought.  “I never had anybody make me feel so contemptibly unlike a gentleman in my life.”

Yet Marta, returning to the hall, had to steady herself in a dizzy moment against the wall.  Complete reaction had come.  She craved sleep as if it were the one true, real thing in the world.  She craved sleep for the clarity of mind that comes with the morning light.  In the haziness of fleecy thought, as slumber drew its soft clouds around her, her last conscious visions were the pleasant ones rising free of a background of horror:  of Feller’s smile when he went back to his automatic for good; of Dellarme’s smile as he was dying; of Stransky’s smile as Minna gave him hope; and of Hugo’s face as he uttered his flute-like cry of protest.