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Clarence Tinling had gone off in a decided huff–so much so indeed that he left his devoted army to carry out their rather misty manoeuvres without any help from him. He was beginning to find a falling-off in their docility of late, which was no doubt owing to their sisters; it was excessively annoying to him that those girls should be so difficult to convince of the protective value of a fortress, and especially that they should decline to take his own superior nerve and courage for granted. And the worst of it was, nothing but some imminent danger was ever likely to convince them, such were their prejudice and narrow-mindedness.

Later that afternoon the family assembled for tea in the cool, shady dining-room; Mrs. Jolliffe, with a gentle anxiety on her usually placid face, sat at the head (Colonel Jolliffe was away shooting in the North just then). ‘Where are all the boys?’ she said, looking round the table. ‘Why don’t they come in?’

‘It’s no use asking us, mother,’ said Hilary, ‘we see so very little of them ever.’

‘Very likely they are washing their hands,’ said her mother.

‘So like them!’ murmured Uncle Lambert in confidence to his tea-cake. ‘But here’s the noble General, at all events. Well, Field Marshal, what have you done with the Standing Army?’

Tinling addressed himself to his hostess. ‘Oh, Mrs. Jolliffe, I’m so sorry I was late, but I had just to run round to the stables for a minute. Oh, the other two? They’re on duty–they’re guarding the camp. In fact, I can’t stay here very long myself.’

‘But the poor dear boys must have their tea!’ cried Mrs. Jolliffe.

‘Well, you know,’ said their veteran officer, as he helped himself to the marmalade, ‘I don’t think a little roughing it is at all a bad thing for them–teaches them that a soldier’s life is not all jam.’

‘No,’ said Hazel, ‘the General seems to get most of that.’

All Clarence said was: ‘I’ll trouble one of you girls for the tea-cake.’

‘I don’t think it’s fair that the poor army should “rough,” as you call it, while you stuff, Clarence,’ said Hazel, indignantly. ‘Mustn’t they come in to tea, mother? It is such nonsense!’

‘Yes, dear, run and call them in,’ said Mrs. Jolliffe. ‘I can’t let my boys go without their meals, Clarence, it’s so bad for them.’

‘It’s not discipline,’ said the chief; ‘still, if they must come, you had better take them this permit from me.’ And he scribbled a line on a scrap of paper, which he handed to Hazel, who received it with the utmost disdain.

Hazel crossed the lawn and over a little rustic bridge to the kitchen garden and hothouses, beyond which was the paddock, where the fortress had been erected. It was a very imposing construction, built, with some help from the village carpenter, of portions of some disused fencing. The stockade had loopholes in it, and above the top she could see a fluttering flag and the point of a tent. Jack was perched up on a kind of look-out, and Guy was pacing solemnly before the covered entrance with a musket of very mild aspect over his shoulder.

‘Who goes there?’ he called out, some time after recognising her.

Hazel vouchsafed no direct reply to this challenge. ‘You’re to come in to tea directly,’ she announced in her most peremptory tone.

‘Advance, and give the countersign,’ said the sentinel.

‘Don’t be a donkey!’ returned Hazel, tossing back her long brown hair impatiently.

Guy levelled his firearm. It is exasperating when a sister can’t enter into the spirit of the thing better than that. Who ever heard of a sentry being told, on challenging, ‘not to be a donkey’? ‘My orders are to fire on all suspicious persons,’ he informed her.

Hazel stopped both her ears. ‘No, Guy, please–it makes me jump so.’

‘There’s no cap on,’ said he.

‘Then there’s a ramrod, or a pea, or something horrid,’ she objected; ‘do turn it the other way.’