rs--but gently, gently boy, you are
frightening the lady. She goes with me of her full consent. Is it not
so, sweetheart?"

"You lie!" said the boy, thickly.

The man laughed. "I tell you," he went on, "that the girl is mine by her
own choice, and you have only to stand aside quietly to save the house
and your own skin. But softly now; you are tearing the lace of my
sleeve. A plague on your clumsy fingers!"

With a wrench Constans twisted himself free and turned to face his
sister. "Issa!" he implored.

But she, with eyes like rain-washed stars, only looked beyond him to
where Quinton Edge stood, softly smiling and holding out his womanish
white hands. She would have rejoined him, but once again Constans forced
her back. The dangling rope of the alarm-bell grazed his hand; he
clutched at it, and a clang re-echoed through the court-yard, rousing
the recreant warders from their slumbers. In that same instant Quinton
Edge blew his whistle.

The Doomsmen must have already crossed the moat and been close up to the
water gate, for the response to their leader's call was immediate.
Quinton Edge had just time to remove the last of the bars securing the
barrier when the night-watch streamed out tumultuously from their
quarters under the arch, and he was obliged to retreat into the
court-yard. But already the outlaws had forced apart the wooden leaves
of the water gate; now they filled the vaulted passageway, and by sheer
impact of superior weight began to drive back the bewildered and
disorganized defenders. Friend and foe together, the mass surged into
the quadrangle, a blind, indefinite cluster of struggling men, like to a
swarm of hiving bees.

The storm had blown over, but the moon was every now and then obscured
by masses of scurrying cloud-wrack, and in these periods of
semi-darkness Doomsman and Stockader were hardly to be told apart. So
closely packed was the scrimmage that the use of any missile weapon was
impossible. The dagger and the night-stick (the latter a stout truncheon
weighted with lead) were doing the work, and effectively, too. And in
that press a man might be struck and die upon his feet, the corpse being
stayed from falling through its juxtaposition to the bodies of the
living.

The men of the keep, now that they had recovered from their first
discomfiture, rallied manfully. So stubborn and bitter raged the
struggle that there was not a sound to be heard outside the noise of
scuffling feet and th