“Oh, lost, lost, ...” cried our witch, and thoughts rushed through her mind of green safe places, and old safe years, and the little hut in a pale bluebell wood, where she was born.  She had time to remember the blue ground, dimpled and starred with sunlight, and the way the bees pulled over the bluebells and swung on them to the tune of cuckoos in a May mist; she had time to think of the green globe ghosts of the bluebells that haunted the wood after the spring was dead.  Bluebells and being young were in all her thoughts, and it was some time before she noticed how slowly she and her enemy were falling.

For they were locked together.  And the enemy witch’s cloak, an orthodox witch cloak except for its colour, which was German field-grey instead of red, was spread out like a parachute, and was supporting them upon their peaceful and almost affectionate descent.

For all I know they might have alighted gently in the Strand, and the authorities might by now be regretting the capture of a most embarrassing and unaccountable prisoner.  But something intervened.  The cloud, like a sheep suffering from the lack of other sheep to follow, had not yet quitted the scene.  The witches’ battle had tended upward, and it had ended several hundred feet above the level of the cloud, which was apparently sinking.  The downward course of the combatants’ fall was therefore arrested, and they found themselves still interlocked, prostrate and embedded, with their eyes and mouths full of woolly wisps of cloud.

Our witch was the first to recover herself.  She stood up and brushed herself, remarking:  “By jove, that parachute cloak of yours is a great dodge.  I wish I’d thought of it.  I always keep my full-dress togs put away, like the ass that I am.  A stitch or two, and a few lengths of whalebone would have done the trick.”

The German was an older woman, and less adaptable to the strange chances of War.  She was silent for a few minutes, seated in the small crater made in the cloud by her fall.  She was not exactly ugly.  She had the sort of face about which one could not help feeling that one could have done it better oneself, or at least that one could have taken more trouble.  It seemed moulded—­even kneaded—­carelessly, in very soft material.  Beneath her open cloak her dress was of the ordinary German Reform-Kleid type, and her figure had the rather jelloid appearance of those who affect this style.  Her regulation witch’s hat was by now, probably, in the Serpentine, and her round head was therefore disclosed, with two stout sand-coloured plaits pursuing each other round it.