ncountering Molly
on the way and sweeping her along in their train. They found Tim volubly
cursing his inability to get up and "watch the fun."

"Look out and tell me if you can see the blighters," he commanded.

As Sara threw open the window, a dull, thudding sound came up to them
from the direction of Oldhampton. There was a sullen menace in the
distance-dulled reverberation.

Molly gurgled with the nervous excitement of a first experience under
fire.

"That's a bomb!" she whispered breathlessly.

She, and Sara, and Jane Crab wedged themselves together in the open
window and leaned far out, peering into the moonless dark. As they
watched, a search-light leapt into being, and a pencil of light moved
flickeringly across the sky. Then another and another--sweeping hither
and thither like the blind feelers of some hidden octopus seeking its
prey. There was something horribly uncanny in those long, straight
shafts of light wavering uncertainly across the dense darkness of the
night sky.

"Can you see the Zepp?" demanded Tim, with lively interest, from his
bed.

"No, it's pitch black--too dark to see a thing," replied Sara.

Exactly as she spoke, a brilliant light hung for a moment suspended
in the dark arch of the sky, then shivered into a blaze of garish
effulgence, girdling the countryside and illuminating every road and
building, every field, and tree, and ditch, as brightly as though it
were broad daylight.

"A star-shell!" gasped Molly. "What a beastly thing!
Positively"--giggling nervously--"I believe they can see right inside
this room!"

"'Tisn't decent!" fulminated Jane indignantly, clutching with modest
fingers at her scanty dressing-gown and straining it tightly across
her chest whilst she backed hastily from the vicinity of the window.
"Lightin' up sudden like that in the middle of the night! I feel for
all the world as though I hadn't got a stitch on me! Come away from the
window, do, miss----"

The light failed as suddenly as it had flared, and a warning crash,
throbbing up against their ears, startled her into silence.

"That's a trifle too near to be pleasant," exclaimed Tim sharply. "Go
downstairs, you three! Do you hear?"

Simultaneously, Selwyn shouted from below--

"Come downstairs! Come down at once! Quick, Sara! I'm coming up to carry
Tim down--and Minnie won't stay alone. Come _on_!"

Obedient to something urgent and imperative in the voices of both
men--something that breathed o