g men,
who had dimly known of him as a sort of celebrity, and suspected him of
being a prig, were reconciled, and accepted him for a nice fellow, and
became of his opinion as to the details of the amusement before them.

It was not very Homeric, when it came off, or very mediaeval, but it
was really lots of fun, or far more fun than one would have thought. The
storming of the castle was very sincere, and the fortress was honestly
defended. Miss Macroyd was made umpire, as she wished, and provided with
a large snowball to sit on at a safe distance; as she was chosen by
the men, the girls wanted to have an umpire of their own, who would be
really fair, and they voted Verrian into the office. But he refused,
partly because he did not care about being paired off with Miss Macroyd
so conspicuously, and partly because he wished to help the fight along.

Attacks were made and repelled, and there were feats of individual and
collective daring on the side of the defenders which were none the less
daring because the assailants stopped to cheer them, and to disable
themselves by laughing at the fury of the foe. A detachment of the
young men at last stormed the castle and so weakened its walls that they
toppled inward; then the defenders, to save themselves from being buried
under the avalanche, swarmed out into the open and made the entire force
of the enemy prisoners.

The men pretended that this was what might have been expected from the
beginning, but by this time the Berserker madness had possessed Miss
Macroyd, too; she left her throne of snow and came forward shouting that
it had been perfectly fair, and that the men had been really beaten,
and they had no right to pretend that they had given themselves up
purposely. The sex-partisanship, which is such a droll fact in women
when there is any question of their general opposition to men, possessed
them all, and they stood as, one girl for the reality of their triumph.
This did not prevent them from declaring that the men had behaved with
outrageous unfairness, and that the only one who fought with absolute
sincerity from first to last was Mr. Verrian.

Neither their unity of conviction concerning the general fact nor the
surprising deduction from it in Verrian's case operated to make them
refuse the help of their captives in getting home. When they had bound
up their tumbled hair, in some cases, and repaired the ravages of
war among their feathers and furs and draperies, in