“Why,” Bushwick said, “this is the snow-fort business of our boyhood! Let’s go out and fortify the ladies at once.” He appealed to Verrian and made a feint of pushing his chair back. “May we use water-soaked snowballs, or must they all be soft and harmless?” he asked of Mrs. Westangle, who was now the centre of a storm of applause and question from the whole table. She kept her head and referred again to her paper. “The missiles of the assailants are to be very soft snowballs, hardly more than mere clots, so that nobody can be hurt in the assault, but the defenders may repel the assailants with harder snowballs.” “Oh,” Miss Macroyd protested, “this is consulting the weakness of our sex.” “In the fury of the onset we’ll forget it,” Verrian reassured her. “Do you think you really will, Mr. Verrian?” she asked. “What is all our athletic training to go for if you do?” Mrs. Westangle read on: “The terms of capitulation can be arranged on the ground, whether the castle is carried or the assailing party are made prisoners by its defenders.” “Hopeless captivity in either case!” Bushwick lamented. “Isn’t it rather academic?” Miss Macroyd asked of Verrian, in a low voice. “I’m afraid, rather,” he owned. “But why are you so serious?” she pursued. “Am I serious?” he retorted, with a trace of exasperation; and she laughed. Their parley was quite lost in the clamor which raged up and down the table till Mrs. Westangle ended it by saying, “There’s no obligation on any one to take part in the hostilities. There won’t be any conscription; it’s a free fight that will be open to everybody.” She folded the paper she had been reading from and put it in her lap, in default of a pocket. She went on impromptu: “You needn’t trouble about building the fort, Mr. Bushwick. I’ve had the farmer and his men working at the castle since daybreak, and the ladies will find it all ready for them, when they’re ready to defend it, down in the meadow beyond the edge of the birch-lot. The battle won’t begin till eleven o’clock.” She rose, and the clamor rose again with her, and her guests crushed about her, demanding to be allowed at least to go and look at the castle immediately. One of the men’s voices asked, “May I be one of the defenders, Mrs. Westangle? I want to be on the winning side, sure.” “Oh, is this going to be a circus chariot-race?” another lamented. “No, indeed,” a girl cried, “it’s to be the real thing.”