Our hero bore the gaze unflinchingly, and said nothing.

“We know that the French Imperial Guard have arrived, and that many new regiments have joined the English.  Is an immediate attack contemplated?”

McKay was still silent.

“Ill-conditioned, obstinate fool!” cried the Prince, angrily.  “It is your only chance.  Speak, or prepare to die!”

“You have no right to press me thus.  I refuse distinctly to betray my own side.”

“Your own side!  You are a Russian—­it is your duty to tell us.  But I will not bandy words with you.  Let him be taken back to a place of safety and await my orders.”

Once more McKay gave himself up for lost.  When he regained the wretched casemate that was his prison he hardly hoped to leave it, except when summoned for execution.

But that day passed without incident, a second also, and a third.  Still our hero found himself alive.

Had they forgotten him?  Or were they too busily engaged to attend to so small a matter as sending him out of the world.

The latter seemed most probable.  Another bombardment, the most incessant and terrible of any that preceded it, as McKay thought.  Although hidden away, so to speak, in the bowels of the earth, he plainly heard the continuous cannonade, the roar of the round-shot, the murderous music of the shells as they sang through the air, and presently exploded with tremendous noise.

He was to have a still livelier experience of the terrible mischief caused by the ceaseless fire of his friends.

Late in the afternoon of the fourth day he was called forth, always in imminent peril of his life, and taken round the head of a harbour which was filled with men-of-war, past the Creek Battery, and up into the main town.  They halted him at the door of a handsome building, greatly dilapidated by round-shot and shell.  This was the naval library, the highest spot in Sebastopol, a centre and focus of danger, but just now occupied by the chiefs of the Russian garrison.

McKay waited, wondering what would happen to him, and in a few minutes narrowly escaped death more than once.  First a shell burst in the street close to him, and two bystanders were struck down by the fragments; then another shell struck a house opposite, and covered the neighbouring space with splinters large and small; next a round-shot tore down the thoroughfare, carrying everything before it.

It was no safer inside than out.  Yet McKay was glad when they marched him in before the generals, who were seated at the open window of the topmost look-out, scanning the besiegers’ operations with their telescopes.

“What is the meaning of this fire?  Have you any idea?” It was Todleben who asked the question.  “Does it prelude a general attack?”

“I cannot tell you,” replied McKay.

“Was there no talk in the enemy’s lines of an expected assault?” asked another.