stammer out something about his mother? He was to stay behind because
the service required it; his mother had nothing to do with it. She was
safe in Vienna--and here it was war.

The captain told the man so. He could not let him think it was a bit of
good fortune, a special dispensation, not to have to go into battle.

Captain Marschner felt easier the minute he had finished scolding the
crushed sinner. His conscience was now quite clear, just as though it
had really been by chance that he had placed the man at that post. But
the feeling did not last very long. The silly fellow would not give up
adoring him as his savior. And when he stammered, "I take the liberty of
wishing you good luck, Captain," standing in stiff military attitude,
but in a voice hoarse and quivering from suppressed tears, such fervor,
such ardent devotion radiated from his wish that the captain suddenly
felt a strange emptiness again in the pit of his stomach, and he turned
sharply and walked away.

Now he knew. Now he could approximately calculate all the things Weixler
had observed in him. Now he could guess how the fellow must have made
secret fun of his sensitiveness, if this simple man, this mere
carpenter's journeyman, could guess his innermost thoughts. For he had
not spoken to him once--simply the night before last, at the entrainment
in Vienna, he had furtively observed his leavetaking from his mother.
How had the confounded fellow come to suspect that the wizened, shrunken
little old hag whose skin, dried by long living, hung in a thousand
loose folds from her cheek-bones, had made such an impression on his
captain? The man himself certainly did not know how touching it looked
when the tiny mother gazed up at him from below and stroked his broad
chest with her trembling hand because she could not reach his face. No