She flew to the chamber beneath, where, since the earl’s departure, in the stead of the cross-bow, a small minion gun had been placed by lord Charles, with its muzzle in the round where the lines of the loop-hole crossed.  A piece of match lay beside it.  She caught it up, lighted it at her candle, and fired the gun.  The tower shook with its roar and recoil.  She had fired the first gun of the siege:  might it be a good omen!

In an instant the castle was alive.  Warders came running from the western gate.  Dorothy had gone, and they could not tell who had fired the gun, but there were no occasion to ask why it had been fired—­for where were the horses?  They could hear, but no longer see them.  There was mounting in hot haste, and a hurried sally.  Lord Charles flung himself on little Dick’s bare back, and flew to reconnoitre.  Fifty of the garrison were ready armed and mounted by the time he came back, having discovered the route they were taking, and off they went at full speed in pursuit.  But, encumbered as they were at first with the driven horses, the twenty men who had carried them off had such a start of their pursuers that they reached the high road where they could not stray, and drove them right before them to sir Trevor Williams at Usk.

‘The fodder will last the longer,’ said the marquis, with a sigh sent after his eighty horses.

‘Mistress Dorothy,’ said lord Charles the next day, ’methinks thou art as Cassandra in Troy.  I shall tremble after this to do aught against thy judgment.’

‘My lord,’ returned Dorothy, ’I have to ask your pardon for my presumption, but it was borne in upon me, as Tom Fool says, that there was danger in the thing.  It was scarcely judgment on my part—­rather a womanish dread.’

’Go thou on to speak thy mind like Cassandra, cousin Dorothy, and let us men despise it at our peril.  I am humbled before thee,’ said lord Charles, with the generosity of his family.

‘Truly, child,’ said lady Glamorgan, ’the mantle of my husband hath fallen upon thee!’

The next day sir Trevor Williams and his men sat down before the castle with a small battery, and the siege was fairly begun.  Dorothy, on the top of the keep, watching them, but not understanding what they were about in particulars, heard the sudden bellow of one of their cannon.  Two of the battlements beside her flew into one, and the stones of the parapet between them stormed into the cistern.  Had her presence been the attraction to that thunderbolt?  Often after this, while she watched the engine below in the workshop, she would hear the dull thud of an iron ball against the body of the tower; but although it knocked the parapet into showers of stones, their artillery could not make the slightest impression upon that.

The same night a sally was prepared.  Rowland ran to lord Charles, begging leave to go.  But his lordship would not hear of it, telling him to get well, and he should have enough of sallying before the siege was over.  The enemy were surprised, and lost a few men, but soon recovered themselves and drove the royalists home, following them to the very gates, whence the guns of the castle sent them back in their turn.