The witches faced each other for some seconds.  A long way away they could hear the spitting and crackling sound of the two broomsticks fighting.  Looking up, they could see the combatants, like black comets in collision.  Our witch, who had good sight, saw that the enemy broomstick was upper-most, and that the writhing Harold was being shaken like a mouse.  Their bristles were interlocked.  One twig floated down between the witches, and our witch recognised it as coming from her poor Harold’s mane.  As, for this purpose, she brought her eyes to her immediate surroundings, it seemed to her suddenly that the sky was growing larger, and then she realised that this was because their refuge was growing smaller.  The edges of the cloud were dissolving.  She saw at last her peril and her disadvantage.  If Harold should be killed or disabled she could never reach the earth again, except by means of a fatal fall of several thousand feet.  The enemy witch, with her ingenious cloak contrivance strapped securely about her, stood a reasonable chance of escape.  But our witch was an amateur in War, she was without support, forlornly dressed in her faithful blue serge three-year-old, and her little squirrel tippet.

Magic, as you know, has limitations.  Fire is of course a plaything in magic hands.  Water has its docile moments, the earth herself may be tampered with, and an incantation may call man or any of his possessions to attention.  But space is too great a thing, space is the inconceivable Hand, holding aloft this fragile delusion that is our world.  There is no power that can mock at space, there is no enchantment that is not lost between us and the moon, and all magic people know—­and tremble to know—­that in a breath, between one second and another, that Hand may close, and the shell of time first crack and then be crushed, and magic be one with nothingness and death and all other delusions.  This is why magic, which treats the other elements as its servants, bows before space, and has to call such a purely independent contrivance as a broomstick to its help in the matter of air-travel.

The witches faced each other on their little unstable sanctuary in the kingdom of space.  Our witch felt secretly sick, and at the same time she tore fear from her mind, and knew that death was but an imperfectly kept secret, and that not an evil one.  After all, we have condemned it unheard.

Both witches could talk a magic tongue, and make themselves mutually understood.  Neither knew the other’s natural tongue.  But when our witch noticed several large ferocious tears rolling down her opponent’s cheeks, she was able, by means of magic, to say:  “Great Scott, my good person, what are you crying for?”

“I am not crying,” replied the German witch.  “I would not allow one tear of mine to fall upon and water one possible grain of wheat in this accursed country of yours.  Certainly I am not crying.”

“Accursed country?” echoed the astounded English witch.  “How d’you mean—­accursed?  This is England, you know.  England hasn’t done anything accursed.  Aren’t you muddling it up with Germany?”