I lay down, but had to speak to tell her to crouch on the floor, out of the way of the bullets, and the effort made more of that blood come into my mouth. Down I lay as flat as a pancake, and she huddled on the floor too, because, whilst she was bending over me to wipe the blood from my mouth, another bullet had smacked up against the wall and sprinkled her with plaster. She crouched there, her face twitching as the Maxim overhead rattled, and the clamour and shrieking outside, coming from the direction of the slope and barbed-wire fence, seemed to grow nearer and louder. At last the appalling uproar sounded as if it were right under the loopholed wall itself—almost under the windows of the house. Ellis’s Maxim stopped—stopping, I realized, because the loopholed wall now screened the Afghans from its fire; but the Maxim aboard the "_B.A._" fired more vigorously than ever, and six-pounder shells were bursting rapidly, one after the other, quite close beneath us. Miss Borsen had buried her face in her hands. Suddenly she raised herself, and, with open mouth and eyes, listened. The character of the yells had altered; they were screams now, they were going away from us. The attack was failing. The Maxim on the roof opened again as the Afghans fell back from the cover of the loopholed wall. I heard Ellis and Hartley shouting joyously, and knew they had got them on the run. The second attack had been driven back. Miss Borsen gave a great gulp and sprang to a shutter, opened it, and looked out. In a moment she had recoiled, covering her eyes with her hands. "They’re flying down the slope; those awful white heaps are growing near the fence. Oh God, it is awful!" she cried, and she burst into tears and ran away. Ellis’s Maxim ceased firing, and gradually all became quiet. In perhaps half an hour Mr. Fisher ran in to see me—flushed and excited. He stopped for a moment when he saw the blood-stain on my pillow, but then burst out with: "We’ve beaten them off! we’ve beaten them off! Thank God! Now they’ll go! I’m sure they’ll go! The Maxim from the _Bunder Abbas_ got them whilst they were crowded under the wall and crumpled them up—crumpled them up—swept them down!" Ellis came in too, grinning as he reported: "That little lot ’as gone ’ome—what was left of them, sir—’oping as ’ow you’re going on all right; but we ain’t more’n ’arf a beltful of cartridges left, sir, that we ain’t. If it ’adn’t been for them blooming ’uts they’d never ’ave got near ’arfway." Mr. Fisher jerked out: "It’s no good burning the huts now. They’ll go back to the mountains to-night! I’m certain they will! It’s no use burning them now!"