iverer?'

'I hope so,' said Philip modestly.

'Of course he is,' said the parrot, putting its head out from the front
of Philip's jacket; 'and he has done six deeds out of the seven
already.'

'It is time that deeds were done here,' said the captain. 'I'll make a
light and get you some supper. I'm in hiding here; but the walls are
thick and all the shutters are shut.'

He bolted a door and opened the slide of a dark lantern.

'Some of us have taken refuge in the old prison,' he said; 'it's never
used, you know, so her spies don't infest it as they do every other part
of the city.'

'Whose spies?'

'The Destroyer's,' said the captain, getting bread and milk out of a
cupboard; 'at least, if you're the Deliverer she must be that. But she
says she's the Deliverer.'

He lighted candles and set them on the table as Lucy asked eagerly:

'What Destroyer? Is it a horrid woman in a motor veil?'

'You've guessed it,' said the captain gloomily.

'It's that Pretenderette,' said Philip. 'Does Mr. Noah know? What has
she been doing?'

'Everything you can think of,' said the captain; 'she says she's Queen,
and that she's done the seven deeds. And Mr. Noah doesn't know, because
she's set a guard round the city, and no message can get out or in.'

'The Hippogriff?' said Lucy.

'Yes, of course I thought of that,' said the captain. 'And so did she.
She's locked it up and thrown the key into one of the municipal wells.'

'But why do the guards obey her?' Philip asked.

'They're not _our_ guards, of course,' the captain answered. 'They're
strange soldiers that she got out of a book. She got the people to pull
down the Hall of Justice by pretending there was fruit in the gigantic
books it's built with. And when the book was opened these soldiers came
marching out. The Sequani and the Aedui they call themselves. And when
you've finished supper we ought to hold a council. There are a lot of us
here. All sorts. Distinctions of rank are forgotten in times of public
peril.'

Some twenty or thirty people presently gathered in that round room from
whose windows Philip and Lucy had looked out when they were first
imprisoned. There were indeed all sorts, match-servants, domino-men,
soldiers, china-men, Mr. Noah's three sons and his wife, a pirate and a
couple of sailors.

'What book,' Philip asked Lucy in an undertone, 'did she get these
soldiers out of?'

'Caesar, I think,' said Lucy. 'And I'm afraid it was my fault. I
remem