I lay with my head in the shadow, but by moving little by little, with sleepy grunts of dissatisfaction, I brought my face far enough round to see through the straw the window at the far end of the passage, which, as I had discovered upon our first coming, opened out upon a ravine running at right angles to the street by which we had come.

Presently I could see the lattice move noiselessly, and a white face appeared with a boy’s blow-gun of pierced bore-tree at its lips.

“Alas!” said I to myself, “that I had had these soldiers’ skill of the knife throwing.  I would have marked that gentleman.”  But I had not even a bow—­only my sword and dagger.  I resolved to begin to learn the practice of pistol and cross-bow on the morrow.

“Plap!  Scat!” The aim was good this time.  We were in darkness.  I listened the barest fragment of a moment.  Some one was stealthily entering at the window end.

“Rise, Jorian and Boris!” I cried.  “An enemy!”

And leaping up I ran to relight the candle.  By good luck the wick was a sound, honest, thick one, a good housewife’s wick—­not such as are made to sell and put in ordinary candles of offertory.

The wick was still red, and smoked as I put my hands behind it and blew. “Twang!  Twang!  Zist!  Zist!” went the arrows and bolts thickly about me, bringing down the clay dust in handfuls thickly from the walls.

“Down on your stomachs—­they are shooting crosswise along the passage !” cried Jorian, who had instantly awakened.  I longed to follow the advice, for I felt something sharp catch the back of my undersuit of soft leather, in which, for comfort, I had laid me down to sleep.  But I must get the candle alight.  Hurrah! the flame flickered and caught at last. “Twang!  Twang!" went the bows, harder at it than ever.  Something hurtled hotly through my hair—­the iron bolt of an arbalest, as I knew by the song of the steel bow in a man’s hand at the end of the passage.

“Get into a doorway, man!” cried Boris, as the light revealed me.

And like a startled rabbit I ran for the nearest—­that within which Helene and the Lady Ysolinde were lying asleep.  The candle, as I have said, was set deep in a niche, which proved a great mercy for us.  For our foes, who had thought to come on us by fraud, could not now shoot it out.  Also, in relighting it, in my eagerness to save myself from the hissing arrows behind me, I had pushed it to the very back of the shrine.  I had no weapon now but my dagger, for, in rising to relight the candle, I had carelessly and blamefully left my sword in the straw.  And I felt very useless and foolish as I stood there to bide the assault with only a bit of guardless knife in my hand.

Suddenly, however, there came a diversion.

“Crash !” went a gun in my very ear.  Flame, smoke—­much of both—­and the stifling smell of sulphur.  Jorian had fired at the face of the pop-gun knave.  That putty-white countenance had a crimson plash on it ere it vanished.  Then came back to us a scream of dreadful agony and the sound of a heavy fall outside.