"So you've found that we have gone, you brilliant intellects!" he shouted, and glared at the wall of the house in the direction of the cheers. "Quick! You have no time to lose!" Minna warned him. "Quick! quick!" cried Marta. Stransky paid no attention to the urgings. He had something more to say to Minna. "I'm going to keep thinking of you and seeing your face--the face of a good woman--while I fight. And when the war is over, may I come to call?" he asked. His feet were so resolutely planted on the flags that apparently the only way to move them was to consent. "Yes, yes!" said Minna. "Now, hurry!" "Say, but you make me happy! Watch me poke it into the Grays for you!" he cried and bolted. "It seems to me that he is the biggest, most ridiculous man I ever saw!" said Minna, as she watched him out of sight. "I'm tired, just tired to death, aren't you?" she added to Marta. "Exactly!" agreed Marta. "I feel as if I had worked my way through hell to heaven and heaven was the chance to sleep." Within the kitchen Mrs. Galland was already slumbering soundly in her chair. Overhead Marta heard the exclamations of male voices and the tread of what was literally the heel of the conqueror--guests that had come without asking! Intruders that had entered without any process of law! Would they overrun the house, her mother's room, her own room? Indignation brought fresh strength as she started up the stairs. The head of the flight gave on to a dark part of the hall. There she paused, held by the scene that a score or more of Gray soldiers, who had riotously crowded into the dining-room, were enacting. XXIX THROUGH THE VENEER These men in the dining-room were members of Fracasse's company of the Grays whom Marta had seen from her window the night before rushing across the road into the garden. It is time for their story--the story of their attack on the redoubt. One of those who remained motionless on the road was the doctor's son. If he had sprained his ankle at manoeuvres, the whole company would have gossiped about the accident. If he had died in the garrison hospital from pneumonia, the barracks would have been blue for a week. If he had fallen in the charge across the white posts, the day-laborer's son on his right and the judge's son on his left would have felt a spasm of horror. This is death, they would have thought; death that barely missed us; death that lays a man in the full tide of youth, as we are, silent and still forever. Twelve hours after the war had begun, when the judge's son missed the doctor's son from the ranks, he remarked: "Then they must have got him!" "Yes, I Saw him roll over on his side," said the laborer's son.