going to
your death, boy. You get out of this 'ere army afore you're took. I
tell ee thy Duke be a doomed man. Look at en's face. Why, boy, there be
eleven thousand soldiers a-marching to put er down. You've only a got
a quarter of that lot. Come out of en, boy. Do-an't ee be led wrong." I
was touched by her kind thought for me; she was risking her life for
me for the second time, but in the hurry of the moment I could not put
words together to thank her.

"Aurelia," I said, "I can't talk to you now. Only get out of this. Don't
stay here. I'm all right."

"No, Martin," she said, in her ordinary voice, "you're not all right.
Come out of this. Slip away tonight to Newenham Abbey. It be over there,
not more than a couple of miles. Oh, come, come. I can't bear to see you
going away to certain death. I KNOW that this force cannot win."

"Yes, Aurelia," I answered. "But I'm not going to be a hang-back for all
that. I'm not going to be a coward. You risk a horrible death, only to
tell me not to do the same. You wouldn't give up a cause you believed
in, merely because it was dangerous. I'll stick by my master, Aurelia.
Don't try to tempt me."

She would have said more; she would perhaps have persuaded me from my
heroics, had not the guns begun firing. That broke the spell with a
vengeance; nothing could be done after that. I shook up my horse, hardly
pausing to say "God bless you." In another minute she was out of sight,
while I was cantering off to the extreme right wing with the Duke's
orders to his officers to cut in on the road to Chard. As I rode along,
behind the scattered line of our men, I could see the rolls of smoke
from the firing on the left. The men on the right were not firing, but
being raw troops they were edging little by little towards the firing,
in which I do not doubt they longed to be, for the sake of the noise.
They say now that the Duke threw away this battle at Axminster. He could
have cut Albemarle's troops to pieces had he chosen to do so. They made
a pretty bold front till we were within gunfire of them, when they all
scattered off to the town pell-mell. While they were in the town, we
could have cut them off from the Chard road, which would have penned
them in while we worked round to seize the bridges. After that, one
brisk assault would have made the whole batch of them surrender. Some of
our officers galloped from our right wing (where I was) to see how the
land lay, before leading off their