oming in of tides. It seemed that all her life she
had been living on a narrowing shore. She remembered all her dawns as
precarious footholds of peace on a threatened rock, and all her evenings
as golden sands sloping down into encroaching sleep. She realised
Everything as a little hopeless garrison against the army of Nothing.

She clutched a pinch of cloud nervously, and it broke off in her hand.
She recalled her senses with a devastating effort.

"Do you mean to say," she said, after a moment, "that poor dear Germany
really believes that she is right and we are wrong? I suppose, when you
come to think of it, a man-eating tiger feels the same way. It fights
with a high heart, and a hot reproach, just as we do----"

"We are Crusaders," said the German. "Crusaders at War with Evil."

"Why, how funny--so are we," said our witch. "But then how very peculiar
that two Crusaders should apparently be fighting each other. Where then
is the Evil? In No Man's Land?"

"We are fighting," recited the German glibly, "because England is the
World Enemy. Throughout the ages she has been the Rob----"

There was a violent explosion quite close to them, and the cloud reeled
and shook. About a foot of the German end of it broke off and was
dissolved.

"We're within range of our guns," said our witch, looking down. "This
cloud must be sinking."

"It will never sink enough to save you," said the German, trying to
conceal the nervousness with which she rearranged her rigid-looking
cloak round her. She seemed to be sinking herself to a certain extent;
perhaps the warmth of her emotions was melting the cloud beneath her.
Certainly she now sat, apparently squat as an idol, her figure submerged
in cloud to the waist.

The English witch looked down, singing a little to keep up her _morale_.
London looked exactly like the maps you buy for sixpence from
sad-looking gentlemen in the Strand, only it was sown with a thin crop
of lights, and was chiefly designed in grey and darker grey, and the
Tubes did not show so indecently. With surprising clearness the rhythmic
whispering of the trains and the scanty traffic could be heard, and once
even the shrill characteristic voice of an ambulance. Somehow space did
not seem disturbed by these sounds; its quietness pressed upon the
listeners' minds like a heavy dream, and there was no real believing in
anything but space. Our witch felt she could have smudged London off the
face of space with her fin