He was susceptible to it and, in turn, to the curiosity about her that had remained unsatisfied at the end of their talk in the hotel. Her own veranda was the natural, familiar place to judge the work of time in those character-forming years from seventeen to twenty-seven. She was not like what she had been in the artificial surroundings of a fortnight ago. She filled the eye and the mind now in the well-knit suppleness of figure and the finished maturity of features which bore the mark of inner growth of knowledge of life. She was not a species of intellectual exotic, as he had feared, too baffling to allow the male intellect to feel comfortable, but very much, as he noted discriminatingly, a woman in all the physical freshness of a woman in her prime. "Just like the old days, isn't it?" he exclaimed with his first sip, convinced that the officers' commissary supplied excellent tea in the field. "Yes, for the moment--if we forget the war!" she replied, and looked away, preoccupied, toward the landscape. If we forget the war! She bore on the words rather grimly. The change that he had noted between the Marta of the hotel reception-room and the Marta of the moment was not altogether the work of ten years. It had developed since she was in the capital. In these three weeks war had been brought to her door. She had been under heavy fire. Yet this subject of the war was the one which he, as an invader, considered himself bound to avoid. "We do forget it at tea, don't we?" he asked. "At least we need not speak of it!" she replied. Safely, then, at first, their conversation ran not on the present but on an intimate past, free of any possible bumpers. The train of memories once started, she herself gave it speed if it stopped at a way station; cargo if it went empty. Prone to avoid recollections that made him feel old--to feel old was to be out of date in his profession---he found these livening with the youth of thirty-two and gratifying as youth's dreams become reality. Feeling as young as a colonel, he had the consciousness of being chief of staff. This was enough to make any soldier enjoy the place and the company and to drink his tea slowly so as to prolong the recess from duty. His second cup growing cold, he was reminded of the value of time, and with a playfully reproachful look at Marta he put a warning finger of conscience on the papers that lay beside the bread plate. "There's work--always work for a chief!" he declared. "I--" Marta was quick to act on the hint. Her hands flew to the arms of her chair as she spoke. "There's always the garden for me! But first--" Yes, first there was poor Hugo. Westerling flushed guiltily that she should have taken his words as a hint, which was only half of his emotion. The other half shot out his hand in a restraining, companionable touch on her forearm, while his eyes--his calculating gray eyes--glinted a youthful entreaty.