Suddenly, among all the furious tumult and clamour below and all round us, I heard, we both heard, another sound—the sound of cheering—cheering loud and lusty. All the noises seemed to die away before it; it grew; nearer and nearer it came; it swelled through the windows, across those sand-bags, in a continued shout of victory; rifle firing died down as though by magic, then burst out again; those shouts of despair which we knew so well by this time filled the whole of the compound, and Miss Borsen, springing to the balcony, tore away a sand-bag, looked down, and rushed back to me. "The _Intrepid_!" she cried, fell on her knees, and sobbed as if her heart would break. *CHAPTER XIX* *The Grey-eyed Lady Decides* Dear old Popple Opstein was the first to find us, rushing up the stairs two steps at a time, calling out my name, and bursting into the room, his yellow hair standing up from his forehead like a parrot’s, and his eyes staring out of his violet face. Miss Borsen flung herself at him, clinging to his great sunburnt hands, laughing and crying hysterically. She would not let him do more than grip my hand, taking him away very quickly for fear the excitement should start the bleeding again, although I imagined that if the agony of that last half-hour had not done so nothing else would. Presently she brought Nicholson, who came lumbering into the room, fat and jolly as ever, felt my pulse, heard what she had to say about me, and told me the same old thing: "Just you lie still, absolutely still, and don’t speak". He promised to come and overhaul me properly later on. "I’ve a terrible lot of jobs on hand now," he said. He must have given orders for no one to visit me, because I was left entirely alone, impatient to hear of all that had happened, and listening to the heavy booming of guns—the _Intrepid’s_ guns, out at sea—shelling the retreating Afghans. At least I imagined that was what they were doing. In about an hour’s time the old head boy brought another trestle-bed into my room, and, whilst I was wondering who was going to use it, Mr. Scarlett was carried in, quite unconscious, his head swathed in bandages. Nicholson followed, and told me that he had had "the devil’s own whack" with the butt end of a rifle, and there was no knowing what would happen.