Helen made a step towards Graham.  Her face was white.  “But, Sire!—­How can one fight?  You will be killed.”

“Perhaps.  Yet, not to do it—­or to let some one else attempt it—.”

“You will be killed,” she repeated.

“I’ve said my word.  Do you not see?  It may save—­London!”

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

They were both clear that he must go.  There was no step back from these towering heroisms.

Her eyes brimmed with tears.  She came towards him with a curious movement of her hands, as though she felt her way and could not see; she seized his hand and kissed it.

“To wake,” she cried, “for this!”

He held her clumsily for a moment, and kissed the hair of her bowed head, and then thrust her away, and turned towards the man in yellow.

He could not speak.  The gesture of his arm said “Onward.”

CHAPTER XXV

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 his jacket smouldering in a circle about the neat bullet hole on his chest.  Close beside him a wounded man, with a leg swathed about, sat with an expressionless face and watched the progress of that burning.  Behind them, athwart the carrier lay the captured monoplane.

“I can’t see him now,” said the second man in a tone of provocation.

The marksman became foul-mouthed and high-voiced in his earnest endeavour to make things plain.  And suddenly, interrupting him, came a noisy shouting from the substage.

“What’s going on now?” he said, and raised himself on one arm to survey the stairheads in the central groove of the stage.  A number of blue figures were coming up these, and swarming across the stage.

“We don’t want all these fools,” said his friend.  “They only crowd up and spoil shots.  What are they after?”

“Ssh!—­they’re shouting something.”