go for if you do?"

Mrs. Westangle read on:

"The terms of capitulation can be arranged on the ground, whether the
castle is carried or the assailing party are made prisoners by its
defenders."

"Hopeless captivity in either case!" Bushwick lamented.

"Isn't it rather academic?" Miss Macroyd asked of Verrian, in a low
voice.

"I'm afraid, rather," he owned.

"But why are you so serious?" she pursued.

"Am I serious?" he retorted, with a trace of exasperation; and she
laughed.

Their parley was quite lost in the clamor which raged up and down the
table till Mrs. Westangle ended it by saying, "There's no obligation
on any one to take part in the hostilities. There won't be any
conscription; it's a free fight that will be open to everybody." She
folded the paper she had been reading from and put it in her lap, in
default of a pocket. She went on impromptu:

"You needn't trouble about building the fort, Mr. Bushwick. I've had the
farmer and his men working at the castle since daybreak, and the ladies
will find it all ready for them, when they're ready to defend it, down
in the meadow beyond the edge of the birch-lot. The battle won't begin
till eleven o'clock."

She rose, and the clamor rose again with her, and her guests crushed
about her, demanding to be allowed at least to go and look at the castle
immediately.

One of the men's voices asked, "May I be one of the defenders, Mrs.
Westangle? I want to be on the winning side, sure."

"Oh, is this going to be a circus chariot-race?" another lamented.

"No, indeed," a girl cried, "it's to be the real thing."

It fell to Verrian, in the assortment of couples in which Mrs.
Westangle's guests sallied out to view the proposed scene of action, to
find himself, not too willingly, at Miss Macroyd's side. In his heart
and in his mind he was defending the amusement which he instantly
divined as no invention of Mrs. Westangle's, and both his heart and
his mind misgave him about this first essay of Miss Shirley in her new
enterprise. It was, as Miss Macroyd had suggested, academic, and at
the same time it had a danger in it of being tomboyish. Golf, tennis,
riding, boating, swimming--all the vigorous sports in which women now
excel--were boldly athletic, and yet you could not feel quite that they
were tomboyish. Was it because the bent of Miss Shirley was so academic
that she was periling upon tomboyishness without knowing it in this
primal inspiration of hers? Inward