"A regiment of cavalry of the Grays and one of the Browns on the same road! They appeared so self-important, as if the sky would fall or the earth heave up to meet the sky if they got out of formation. I imagined each man a metal figure that fitted astride a metal horse of the kind that comes to children at Christmas time. They might better be engaged in brass-ring-snatching contests at the merry-go-rounds of public fairs. I wanted to brush them all over with a wave of the hand as you might the battalions of the nursery floor. Just drilling and drilling in order to slash at one another some day. Flight! flight! It makes one's mind as big and broad as the world. Oh, what a wonderful talk I'll have for my kids next Sunday!" * * * * * Now that Lanstron was the organizer of the aviation corps his own flights were rare. Mostly they were made to La Tir. His visits to Marta were his holidays? All the time that she was absent on her journey around the world they had corresponded. Her letters, so revealing of herself and her peculiar angles of observation, formed a bundle sacredly preserved. Her mother's joking reference about her girlish resolution not to marry a soldier often recurred to him. There, he sometimes thought, was the real obstacle to his great desire. He wished, this morning, that he were not Colonel Lanstron, but the bridge-builder returning from his triumph after he had at last spanned the chasm and controlled the floods. Ah, there was something like romance and real accomplishment in that! What an easy time a bridge-builder had, comparatively, too! What an easy master capital must be compared to Eugene Partow! But no! If Marta loved it would not matter whether he were bridge builder or army builder. Yes, she was like that. And what right had he to think of marriage? He could not have any home. He was now in the capital; again, along the frontier--a vagabond of duty and Partow's orders. * * * * * When he alighted from the plane he thrust his left hand into his blouse pocket. He always carried it there, as if it were literally sewn in place. In moments of emotion the scarred nerves would twitch as the telltale of his sensitiveness; and this was something he would conceal from others no matter how conscious he was of it himself. He found the Galland veranda deserted. In response to his ring a maid came to the open door. Her face was sad, with a beauty that had prematurely faded. But it lighted pleasurably in recognition. Her hair was thick and tawny, lying low over the brow; her eyes were a softly luminous brown and her full lips sensitive and yielding. Lanstron, an intimate of the Galland household, knew her story well and the part that Marta had played in it.