an--" cried the man in yellow.

"There has been no need. But now the time has come. Tell them now--send
them my message--to put it upon the guides. I see now something to do. I
see now why I am here!"

The old man dumbly interrogated the man in yellow nodded, and
hurried out.

Helen made a step towards Graham. Her face was white. "But, Sire!--How
can one fight? You will be killed."

"Perhaps. Yet, not to do it--or to let some one else attempt it--."

"You will be killed," she repeated.

"I've said my word. Do you not see? It may save--London!"

He stopped, he could speak no more, he swept the alternative aside by a
gesture, and they stood looking at one another.

They were both clear that he must go. There was no step back from these
towering heroisms.

Her eyes brimmed with tears. She came towards him with a curious movement
of her hands, as though she felt her way and could not see; she seized
his hand and kissed it.

"To wake," she cried, "for this!"

He held her clumsily for a moment, and kissed the hair of her bowed head,
and then thrust her away, and turned towards the man in yellow.

He could not speak. The gesture of his arm said "Onward."

CHAPTER XXV

THE COMING OF THE AEROPLANES

Two men in pale blue were lying in the irregular line that stretched
along the edge of the captured Roehampton stage from end to end, grasping
their carbines and peering into the shadows of the stage called Wimbledon
Park. Now and then they spoke to one another. They spoke the mutilated
English of their class and period. The fire of the Ostrogites had
dwindled and ceased, and few of the enemy had been seen for some time.
But the echoes of the fight that was going on now far below in the lower
galleries of that stage, came every now and then between the staccato of
shots from the popular side. One of these men was describing to the other
how he had seen a man down below there dodge behind a girder, and had
aimed at a guess and hit him cleanly as he dodged too far. "He's down
there still," said the marksman. "See that little patch. Yes. Between
those bars."

A few yards behind them lay a dead stranger, face upward to the sky, with
the blue canvas of his jacket smouldering in a circle about the neat
bullet hole on his chest. Close beside him a wounded man, with a leg
swathed about, sat with an expressionless face and watched the progress
of that burning. Behind them, athwart the carrier lay the captured
mono