“I know, I know,” wept the German witch.  “My wizard fell at Vimy Ridge....”

“You are talking magic at last,” said our witch.  “Dear witch, why don’t you go home and ask how it can be a good plan for one Crusader against Evil to blow up another?  How can two people be righteously scourging each other at the same time?  It is like the old problem of two serpents eating each other, starting at the tail.  There must be some misunderstanding somewhere.  Or else some real Evil somewhere.”

“There is,” said the German, recovering herself.  “England is Evil.  England is the World Enemy.  Throughout the ages she has been the Robber State, crushing——­”

But she had little luck.  Once more she was interrupted by an explosion, a much louder one, directly above them.  Our witch hardly heard the noise; she seemed suddenly to have found the climax of her life, and the climax was pain.  There was pain and a feeling of terrible change all over her, smothering her, and a super-pain in her shoulder.  After a second or two as long as death, she realised dimly that she was all tensely strung to an attitude, like a marionette.  Her hands were up trying to shield her head, her chin was pressed down to her drawn-up knees.  Her blue serge shoulder was extraordinarily wet and immovable.  She looked along the cloud.  Her enemy was not there.  There was a round hole in the cloud, and as she leaned painfully towards it, she could see a few of the lights of London, and something falling spasmodically towards them.

The cloud had been shaken to its foundations by the two explosions, and the German witch, who had been seated perhaps on a seam in the material, or at any rate on one of the less stable parts of the fabric, had fallen through.  Her parachute cloak, in passing through the hole in the cloud, had been turned inside out above her head, and rendered useless.  Over and about her falling figure her broomstick darted helplessly, uttering curious sad cries, like a seagull’s.

Even as the English witch watched her enemy’s disaster, the larger part of the cloud, weakened by all the shock and movement, broke away with a hissing sound.  The witch’s feet hung now over space, she dared not move; she had difficulty in steadying herself with her unwounded arm, for her hand could find only a quicksand of dissolving cloud to lean on.  She had no thoughts left but thoughts of danger and of pain.

But Harold the Broomstick came back.  The witch heard a rustling sound close to her, and it startled her more than all the noise of the guns, which had come, as it seemed, from the forgotten other side of eternity.  The rough head of Harold appeared over the cloud’s edge, and insinuated itself pathetically under her arm.  Very carefully and very painfully the witch reached a kneeling position, damaging her refuge with every movement in spite of her care.  She gasped with pain, and Harold tried to look very strong and hopeful to comfort her.  He straightened his back, and she crawled into the saddle.  The tremor of their launching split the cloud into several parts, which disintegrated.  There was no more foot-hold on it; the tide had come up and submerged it.