into space.

"Oh, lost, lost, ..." cried our witch, and thoughts rushed through her
mind of green safe places, and old safe years, and the little hut in a
pale bluebell wood, where she was born. She had time to remember the
blue ground, dimpled and starred with sunlight, and the way the bees
pulled over the bluebells and swung on them to the tune of cuckoos in a
May mist; she had time to think of the green globe ghosts of the
bluebells that haunted the wood after the spring was dead. Bluebells and
being young were in all her thoughts, and it was some time before she
noticed how slowly she and her enemy were falling.

For they were locked together. And the enemy witch's cloak, an orthodox
witch cloak except for its colour, which was German field-grey instead
of red, was spread out like a parachute, and was supporting them upon
their peaceful and almost affectionate descent.

For all I know they might have alighted gently in the Strand, and the
authorities might by now be regretting the capture of a most
embarrassing and unaccountable prisoner. But something intervened. The
cloud, like a sheep suffering from the lack of other sheep to follow,
had not yet quitted the scene. The witches' battle had tended upward,
and it had ended several hundred feet above the level of the cloud,
which was apparently sinking. The downward course of the combatants'
fall was therefore arrested, and they found themselves still
interlocked, prostrate and embedded, with their eyes and mouths full of
woolly wisps of cloud.

Our witch was the first to recover herself. She stood up and brushed
herself, remarking: "By jove, that parachute cloak of yours is a great
dodge. I wish I'd thought of it. I always keep my full-dress togs put
away, like the ass that I am. A stitch or two, and a few lengths of
whalebone would have done the trick."

The German was an older woman, and less adaptable to the strange chances
of War. She was silent for a few minutes, seated in the small crater
made in the cloud by her fall. She was not exactly ugly. She had the
sort of face about which one could not help feeling that one could have
done it better oneself, or at least that one could have taken more
trouble. It seemed moulded--even kneaded--carelessly, in very soft
material. Beneath her open cloak her dress was of the ordinary German
_Reform-Kleid_ type, and her figure had the rather jelloid appearance of
those who affect this style. Her regulation witch's hat w