At this moment the clanging of the front-door bell resounded through the house for the second time.  The frightened butler, who was a young man and rather nervous, stood by the door, not daring to open it.  The ladies of the household had by this time come out of the dining-room; Mrs. Wedmore looked flush and frightened; the girls were tittering.  Smothered explosions of laughter came from time to time to the ears of the master of the house, from the closed door which led to the servants’ hall.

“Shall—­shall I see who it is, sir?” asked the butler, who could hear the epithets applied to him on the other side of the door.

“No, no!” cried Doreen.  “Not on any account!  Tell them to put the thing down and go away.”

There was a pause, during which the bell rang again, and there was a violent lunge at the door.

“They won’t—­they won’t go away, Miss, without they get something first,” said the butler, who was as white as a sheet.

“Tell them,” began Mr. Wedmore, in a loud tone of easy confidence, “to take it round to the back door, and—­and to send a—­deputation to me in the morning; when—­er—­they shall be properly rewarded for their trouble.”

“They ought to reward us for our trouble, papa, don’t you think?” suggested Doreen.

“There!  They’ve begun to reward themselves,” said Queenie, as a stone came through one of the windows.

Mr. Wedmore was furious.  He saw the mistake he had made, but he would not own it.  Putting strong constraint upon himself, he assumed a gay geniality of manner which his looks belied, and boldly advanced to the door.  But Mrs. Wedmore flung her arms round her husband in a capacious embrace, dragging him backward with an energy there was no use resisting.

“No, no, no, George!  I won’t have you expose yourself to those horrid roughs!  Don’t open the door, Bartram!  Put up the bolt!”

“Nonsense!  Nonsense, my dear!” retorted Mr. Wedmore, who was, perhaps, not so unwilling to be saved from the howling mob as he wished to appear.  “It’s only good-humored fun—­of a rough sort, perhaps, but quite harmless.  It’s some mischievous boy who threw the stone.  But, of course, they must go round to the back.”

“Cook won’t dare to open the door to ’em, sir,” said the butler.

The situation was becoming serious.  There was no denying that the house was besieged.  Mrs. Wedmore began to feel like a chatelaine of the Cavalier party, with the Roundhead army at the doors clamoring for her husband’s blood.  The cries of the villagers were becoming more derisive.

As a happy thought, Mrs. Wedmore suggested haranguing the mob from an upper window.  This course seemed rather ignominious, but prudence decided in its favor.

There was a rush upstairs, and Mr. Wedmore, followed by all the ladies, flung himself into the bathroom and threw up the window.

It was not at all the sort of thing that merry squire of the olden times might have been expected to do.  In fact, as Doreen remarked, there were no bathrooms in the olden time to harangue a mob from.  But Mr. Wedmore’s medieval ardor being damped, he submitted to circumstances with fortitude.