Again the lonely girl looked out of the window, but this time with the sharpest annoyance, and wished herself even lonelier and more remote than her poem declared. Half a dozen lively children, including her own fat little brother Robert, had begun to play in the yard across the street, where the young man flanneled sat; and sometimes one of them came to hide behind his chair, though Renfrew was so immersed in his petty burgher dreams that he did not appear to know it. The shouting of the children interfered with composition, however, and while the poetess struggled on, the interference grew so poignant that it became actually a part of the texture of her poem: “Oh, I am lonely in this world of noises, This world of piercing senseless outcries, I hate it so! I hear the shrill, Malignant yowls of children, Growing up like all the rest Without the power of thinking. Oh, noises how accursed——” Here her poem came to an end forever—that is to say, it had no end, was never completed, remained a fragment. Muriel jumped up, and the expressions she employed were appropriate for a maddened poet’s use, though they befitted not a maiden’s. The accursed noises across the street had become unbearable; they roused Renfrew from his petty dreams, and he straightened up in his chair to see what was going on. “Here, here!” he said. “This isn’t the Fourth of July. Quiet down a little, will you?” Four boys, Masters Robert Eliot, Laurence Coy, Thomas Kimball and Freddie Mears, an eight-year-old cousin of Renfrew’s, were advancing upon him, each evidently operating an imaginary machine-gun. “Bang! Bang! Bang! Bangity, Bangity, Bang! _Bang!_” they shouted with the utmost violence of their lungs. “Stop it!” Renfrew commanded, and as the machine-guns seemed to be levelled straight at himself, he added: “Let me alone. I haven’t done anything to you. What do you want to kill _me_ for?” He mistook their meaning, as he discovered immediately. “_Ping! Ping! Ping!_” a shrill voice cried out from the ground just behind his chair—another machine-gun, or else an “ottomatick.” “_Pingity, pingity, ping. Ur-r-r-r-r-ping!_” The voice was that of Renfrew’s nine-year-old sister Daisy; and looking round and down, he discovered her crouching low behind his chair, firing continuously. Renfrew perceived that he was a fortification of some sort; for although the presence of a grown person has naturally a stultifying effect upon children, they readily forget him if he remains in his own sphere; then he becomes but part of their landscape; they will use him as a castle, or perhaps as a distant Indian. Renfrew was now a log cabin. “_Ping! Ping! Pingety ur-r-r-r-r-ping!_” Daisy shrieked from behind him. “You’re all dead! Lay down!”