"Then, sir," said Hugo, speaking, evidently, because he was expected to say something, "I suppose, of course, that I shall be shot. But"--he was smiling in the way that he would when he brought a "good one" to the head in the barracks--"but it will not be necessary to do it more than once, will it? To tell you the truth, I had not counted on being shot more than once." Westerling was like a man who had lunged a blow at an object and struck only air. "I said that he was not a coward," Marta remarked quietly. There was nothing in her manner to imply that she was defending Hugo. She seemed to be incidentally justifying a previous observation of her own. A smile in face of death! Westerling's prayer was for countless masses of infantry who would smile in face of death and do his bidding. He could not resist a soldier's admiration, which, however, he would not permit to take the form of words. The form which it took was a sharp thrust of his fist into the hollow of his hand. He had, too, a sense of defeat which was uppermost as he spoke--a defeat that he was bound to retrieve. "You have a home, a father, and a mother?" he asked. "Yes, sir." "And perhaps a sweetheart?" Westerling proceeded. Hugo unmistakably flushed. "I don't think sir, that official statistics require an answer to that question. I"--and again that confounded smile, as Westerling was beginning to regard it--"I trust, sir, that I shall not have to be shot more than once if we do not bring any one not yet officially of my family into the affair." "You do not seem to like life," Westerling observed. "I love life!" answered Hugo earnestly. "I try to get something out of every minute of it; if nothing particular, at least the miracle of living and breathing and thinking and seeing--seeing such beautiful scenes as this." He looked away toward the glorious landscape. It was the first time that he had lifted the steady gaze of those studious blue eyes from Westerling, but directly they were back on duty. "It is because I love life," he continued, "and think that everybody else must love life, that I do not want to kill. Because I love my country I know that others love their country, and I want them to keep their country." Marta's glance had followed Hugo's into the distance. It still rested there intently. To Westerling she showed only a profile, with the shadow of the porch between them and the golden light of receding day in the background: a golden light on a silhouette of ivory, a silhouette that you might find without meaning or so full of meaning as to hold an observer in a quandary as to what she was thinking or whether or not she was thinking at all.