that, sir?" he asked.

"None. It remains!" Westerling replied.

The clerk went out impressed. His chief taking to sums of subtraction
and totally preoccupied! The 132d to remain! He, too, had a
question-mark in his secret mind.

Westerling proceeded with his mathematics. Having heavily shaded the
tens, he essayed a sum in division. He found that ten went into seventy
just seven times.

"One-seventh the allotted span of life!" he mused. "Take off fifteen
years for youth and fifteen after fifty-five--nobody counts after that,
though I mean to--and you have ten into forty, which is one fourth. That
is a good deal. But it's more to a woman than to a man--yes, a lot more
to a woman than to a man!"

The clerk was right in thinking Westerling preoccupied; but it was not
with the international crisis. He had dismissed that for the present
from his thoughts by sending the 128th Regiment to South La Tir. He
might move some other regiments in the morning if advices from the
premier warranted. At all events, the army was ready, always ready for
any emergency. He was used to international crises. Probably a dozen had
occurred in the ten years since he had spoken his adieu to a young girl
at a garden-gate. Over his coffee the name of Miss Marta Galland, in a
list of arrivals at a hotel, had caught his eye in the morning paper. A
note to her had brought an answer, saying that her time was limited,
but she would be glad to have him call at five that afternoon.