ntly hunted. Half their purpose is already
spoiled, for it's no longer secret.... They may break us by sheer
weight, and I fancy the first shooting will be done by us. It's the
windows I'm afraid of."

Some tone in his quiet voice reached the girl in the wicker chair. She
looked up wildly, saw him, and with a cry of "Alesha" ran to his arms.
There she hung, while his hand fondled her hair, like a mother with a
scared child. Sir Archie, watching the whole thing in some
stupefaction, thought he had never in his days seen more nobly matched
human creatures.

"It is my friend," she cried triumphantly, "the friend whom I appointed
to meet me here. Oh, I did well to trust him. Now we need not fear
anything."

As if in ironical answer came a great crashing at the verandah door,
and the twanging of chords cruelly mishandled. The grand piano was
suffering internally from the assaults of the boiler-house ladder.

"Wull I gie them a shot?" was McGuffog's hoarse inquiry.

"Action stations," Alexis ordered, for the command seemed to have
shifted to him from Dougal. "The windows are the danger. The boy will
patrol the ground floor, and give us warning, and I and this man,"
pointing to Sime, "will be ready at the threatened point. And, for
God's sake, no shooting, unless I give the word. If we take them on at
that game we haven't a chance."

He said something to Saskia in Russian and she smiled assent and went
to Sir Archie's side. "You and I must keep this door," she said.

Sir Archie was never very clear afterwards about the events of the next
hour. The Princess was in the maddest spirits, as if the burden of
three years had slipped from her and she was back in her first
girlhood. She sang as she carried more lumber to the pile--perhaps the
song which had once entranced Heritage, but Sir Archie had no ear for
music. She mocked at the furious blows which rained at the other end,
for the door had gone now, and in the windy gap could be seen a blur of
dark faces. Oddly enough, he found his own spirits mounting to meet
hers. It was real business at last, the qualms of the civilian had
been forgotten, and there was rising in him that joy in a scrap which
had once made him one of the most daring airmen on the Western Front.
The only thing that worried him now was the coyness about shooting.
What on earth were his rifles and shot-guns for unless to be used? He
had seen the enemy from the verandah wall, and a more ruffi