at the door," he said. "Breathe deep. On the third shot we go for
the embankment. I'll get you up it. Then over the road. There's timber
that side as well as this."

Again Amaryllis nodded, and Dick, rising a little higher, disposed the
cap between two clumps of leaves, where he hoped it would seem supported
by his head.

"Real G. A. Henty stunt, ain't it?" he said. "But I've shaken him up a
bit, and it's worth trying."

He raised the cap slightly, let it drop back again on the rhododendron
leaves, and laid himself full length on the ground.

"Third shot--if it comes. Breathe deep," he repeated.

There was a pause, agonizing to the girl; and then it came.

Three shots, thumping in rapid succession, the last of them depositing
the cap almost in her hands. Clutching it, she scrambled to her feet,
and Dick, catching her by the arm beneath the shoulder, forced her into
a thirty yards' sprint, in which, while her heart beat as if it would
burst, her feet seemed to touch the ground barely half a dozen times
before the grey stones of the embankment rushed to meet them almost in
the face.

How he managed to force her to the top and bundle her over the parapet,
she could never remember, any more than she could forget Ockley's next
shot, which was discharged as their figures showed against his sky-line
for the two seconds which it took them to cross the road and fling
themselves recklessly down the slope of its other side.

"Brace up," said Dick at the bottom. "You've got some guts, anyhow; and
once we're well into that undergrowth, your hairy friend may come after
us with a Vickers and be damned to him."

To get to it he had to lift her over a swampy patch in a hollow to a
stony place beyond it; whereafter they were soon as well hidden from the
road as its outline lay exposed to the search of their eyes.

But Amaryllis at first left the watching to his, closing her own and
lying still, in sheer womanly terror of being sick. Somewhere within was
a doubt as to whether she did not already adore him, and a pitiable
anxiety that "nothing horrid" should be associated in his mind with her
person.

Dick, lying at full length, turned his eyes every now and again from his
watch on the road to look at the girl's face; and saw, with anxiety as
well as pity, how pale it was, and how wasted already by hunger, fear
and running--and perhaps by the drug they had given her the night
before. He must ask no further exertion of her unt