ding your own, are you, by the water gate?"

"Oh, yes," replied Forrester, rousing slightly. "All quiet there. No
more arrows. Converts behaving splendidly. Two or three have begged
for guns."

"Give 'em this." Heywood skipped up the ladder, to return with a rifle.
"And this belt--Kempner's. Poor chap, he'll never ask you to return
them.--Anything else?"

"No," answered Gilly, taking the dead man's weapon, and moving off into
the darkness. "No, except "--He halted. "Except if we come to a pinch,
and need a man for some tight place, then give me first chance. Won't
you? I could do better, now, than--than you younger men. Oh, and Hackh;
your efforts to-night--Well, few men would have dared, and I feel
immensely grateful."

He disappeared among the orange trees, leaving Rudolph to think about
such gratitude.

"Now, then," called Heywood, and stooped to the white bundle at their
feet. "Don't stand looking. Can't be helped. Trust old Gilly to take it
like a man. Come bear a hand."

And between them the two friends carried to the nunnery a tiresome
theorist, who had acted once, and now, himself tired and limp, would
offend no more by speaking.

When the dawn filled the compound with a deep blue twilight, and this in
turn grew pale, the night-long menace of noise gradually faded also,
like an orgy of evil spirits dispersing before cockcrow. To ears long
deafened, the wide stillness had the effect of another sound, never
heard before. Even when disturbed by the flutter of birds darting from
top to dense green top of the orange trees, the air seemed hushed by
some unholy constraint. Through the cool morning vapors, hot smoke from
smouldering wreckage mounted thin and straight, toward where the pale
disk of the moon dissolved in light. The convex field stood bare, except
for a few overthrown scarecrows in naked yellow or dusty blue, and for a
jagged strip of earthwork torn from the crest, over which the Black Dog
thrust his round muzzle. In a truce of empty silence, the defenders
slept by turns among the sand-bags.

The day came, and dragged by without incident. The sun blazed in the
compound, swinging overhead, and slanting down through the afternoon. At
the water gate, Rudolph, Heywood, and the padre, with a few forlorn
Christians,--driven in like sheep, at the last moment,--were building
a rough screen against the arrows that had flown in darkness, and that
now lay scattered along the path. One of these a workman sud