Merrylips shouted too. She snatched her pistol from her sash and ran, as the trooper had run, till she found herself at the foot of the western rampart, where one twilight she had tried to comfort Rupert. She found Rupert there now. His face was smudged with powder, and he was loading guns and passing them up to the men on the rampart above him. They were firing fast, all but one or two who lay quiet. "Shall I aid thee?" Merrylips asked. Rupert nodded, as if he had no time to quarrel now. So she knelt at his side and helped him to load the guns for hours and hours, as it seemed to her. Right overhead the sun came out from the gray film of clouds. The light was reflected from the steel helmets and the gleaming back-pieces of the troopers on the ramparts. "Come!" said Rupert, suddenly. Holding fast to the gun that he had just loaded, he scrambled up the rampart, and Merrylips scrambled after him. She saw that the fields below, which had been so peaceful on that twilight when she last had looked upon them, were all alive now with mounted men. A line of low trees that she remembered, some two hundred feet away, was now a line of gray smoke, spangled with red flashes of fire. All round her little clods of dirt kept spurting up so that she was sprinkled with dust. In the air, every now and then, was a humming, as of monstrous bumblebees. She did not know what had happened, in the moment of darkness and outcry through which she had passed. She was off the rampart. She was sitting on the porch of the great house, and over her stood a big, surly fellow, a trooper who had been least among her friends. "And if I catch thee again within range of the firing," she heard him say, "for the sake of mine own bairn at home, I swear I'll twist thy neck!" The trooper was gone, and she sat staring at a red stain upon her sleeve. It was blood, and yet she was not hurt, she knew. She wondered what those cries had been that she had heard, and what had been the weight that had fallen against her. She was very hungry. She was ashamed to think of such a thing, but she had not eaten since the night before. She stole into the mess-room and from the table got a pocketful of bread. While she was gnawing at it, she heard a louder noise that drowned the cracking of the muskets. At first she thought that it was a sound within her own ears, but when she had run out into the courtyard, she heard the men about her saying:-- "'Tis the great guns from Ryeborough!" Through the rattle of the muskets and the boom of the artillery, a sharp cry rang through the courtyard: "Fire!" Against the gray sky a spurt of pale flame could be seen on the thatched roof of one of the great barns.