It was a steel harness of his own will that Westerling wore, without admitting that it galled him, and he laid it off only in Marta's presence. With her, his growing sense of isolation had the relief of companionship. She became a kind of mirror of his egoism and ambitions. He liked to have her think of him as a great man unruffled among weaker men. In the quiet and seclusion of the garden, involuntarily as one who has no confidant speaks to himself, reserving fortitude for his part before the staff, while she, under the spell of her purpose, silently, with serene and wistfully listening eyes, played hers, he outlined how the final and telling blow was to be struck. "We must and we shall win!" he kept repeating. * * * * * Through a rubber disk held to his ear in the closet of his bedroom a voice, tremulous with nervous fatigue, was giving Lanstron news that all his aircraft and cavalry and spies could not have gained; news worth more than a score of regiments; news fresh from the lips of the chief of staff of the enemy. The attack was to be made at the right of Engadir, its centre breaking from the redoubt manned by Fracasse's men. "Marta, you genius!" Lanstron cried. "You are the real general! You--" "Not that, please!" she broke in. "I'm as foul and depraved as a dealer in subtle poisons in the Middle Ages! Oh, the shame of it, while I look into his eyes and feign admiration, feign everything which will draw out his plans! I can never forget the sight of him as he told me how two or three or four hundred thousand men were to be crowded into a ram, as he called it--a ram of human flesh!--and guns enough in support, he said, to tear any redoubts to pieces; guns enough to make their shells as thick as the bullets from an automatic!" "We'll meet ram with ram! We'll have some guns, too!" exclaimed Lanstron. "We'll send as heavy a shell fire at their infantry as they send into our redoubts." "Yes; oh, yes!" she replied. "Westerling couldn't say it any better! What difference is there between you? Each at his desk is saying: 'This regiment will die here; that regiment will die there!' I bring you word of one human ram going to destruction in order that you may send another to destroy and be destroyed! And I'm worse than you. I am the go-between in the conspiracy of universal murder, sleeping in a good bed every night, in no danger--when I can sleep; but I can't. I go mad from thinking of my part, keying myself up deliriously to each fresh deceit!" With every sentence her voice broke and it seemed that she would not be able to utter another. Yet she kept on in the alternation of taut, pitiful monotone and dry, coughing sobs.