He was gone, without waiting for any reply, this stranger whom her part had not permitted to know well.  A thousand words striving for utterance choked her as she watched him pass out of sight.  Westerling was regarding her with a stare which fixed itself first on one thing and then on another in dull misery.  Near by were Bellini, the chief of intelligence, and a subaltern who had arrived only a minute before.  The subaltern was dust-covered.  He seemed to have come in from a hard ride.  Both were watching Marta, as if waiting for her to speak.  She met Westerling’s look steadily, her eyes dark and still and in his the reflection of the vague realization of more than he had guessed in her relations with Hugo.

“Well,” she breathed to Westerling, “the war goes on!”

“That’s it!  That’s the voice!” exclaimed the subaltern in an explosion of recognition.

A short, sharp laugh of irony broke from Bellini; the laugh of one whose suspicions are confirmed in the mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous.  Marta looked around at the interruption, alert, on guard.

“You seem amused,” she remarked curiously.

“No, but you must have been,” replied Bellini hoarsely.  “Early this morning, not far from the castle, this young officer found in the crater made by a ten-inch shell a wire that ran in a conduit underground.  The wire was intact.  He tapped it.  He heard a voice thanking some one for her part in the victory, and it seems that the woman’s voice that answered is yours, Miss Galland.  So, General Westerling, the leak in information was over this wire from our staff into the Browns’ headquarters, as Bouchard believed and as I came to believe.”

So long had Marta expected this moment of exposure that it brought no shock.  Her spirit had undergone many subtle rehearsals for the occasion.

“Yes, that is true,” she heard herself saying, a little distantly, but very quietly and naturally.

Westerling fell back as from a blow in the face.  His breath came hard at first, like one being strangled.  Then it sank deep in his chest and his eyes were bloodshot, as a bull’s in his final effort against the matador.  He raised a quivering, clenched fist and took a step nearer her.

But far from flinching, Marta seemed to be greeting the blow, as if she admitted his right to strike.  She was without any sign of triumph and with every sign of relief.  Lying was at an end.  She could be truthful.

“Do you recall what I said in the reception-room at the hotel?” she asked.

The question sent a flash into a hidden chamber of his mind.  Now the only thing he could remember of that interview was the one remark which hitherto he had never included in his recollection of it.

“You said I could not win.”  He drew out the words painfully.