now--send
them my message--to put it upon the guides."

The old man dumbly interrogated the man in yellow, nodded, and hurried
out.

Helen made a step towards Graham. Her face was white. "But--How can one
fight? You will be killed."

"Perhaps. Yet, not to do it--or to let someone else attempt it--."

He stopped, he could speak no more, he swept the alternative aside by a
gesture, and they stood looking at one another.

"You are right," she said at last in a low tone. "You are right. If it
can be done... must go."

Those days for not altogether

He moved a step towards her, and she stepped back, her white face
struggled against him and resisted him. "No," she gasped. "I cannot
bear--. Go now."

He extended his hands stupidly. She clenched her fists. "Go now," she
cried. "Go now."

He hesitated and understood. He threw his hands up in a queer
half-theatrical gesture. He had no word to say. He turned from her.

The man in yellow moved towards the door with clumsy belated tact. But
Graham stepped past him. He went striding through the room where the
Ward Leader bawled at a telephone directing that the aeropile should be
put upon the guides.

The man in yellow glanced at Helen's still figure, hesitated and hurried
after him. Graham did not once look back, he did not speak until the
curtain of the ante-chamber of the great hall fell behind him. Then he
turned his head with curt swift directions upon his bloodless lips.

CHAPTER XXIV. THE COMING OF THE AEROPLANES

Two men in pale blue were lying in the irregular line that stretched
along the edge of the captured Roehampton stage from end to end,
grasping their carbines and peering into the shadows of the stage called
Wimbledon Park. Now and then they spoke to one another. They spoke the
mutilated English of their class and period. The fire of the Ostrogites
had dwindled and ceased, and few of the enemy had been seen for some
time. But the echoes of the fight that was going on now far below in
the lower galleries of that stage, came every now and then between the
staccato of shots from the popular side. One of these men was describing
to the other how he had seen a man down below there dodge behind a
girder, and had aimed at a guess and hit him cleanly as he dodged too
far "He's down there still," said the marksman. "See that little patch.
Yes. Between those bars." A few yards behind them lay a dead stranger,
face upward to the sky, with the blue canvas of