At that moment, when Roy would have surrendered his life to have rung out an alarm, the signal of danger, treachery, and hopeless disaster rang out in the form of a shot from the battlements overhead, and this was followed by another and another. But as the prisoner was hurried into the open air, armed men seemed to be gliding out of the darkness on all sides, their source, as far as he could make out in those agitated moments, being the bases of the towers. Then, as the trumpet rang out, fighting began all around the castle at once, not from the outside, but from within. Men had evidently crept silently up to the four towers, and gathered there from the corridors to which they had been admitted; and at the sound of the trumpet, a simultaneous attack was made, which, coming from the unguarded rear, and in tremendous, constantly increasing force, could not fail of being successful. Roy stood there in the midst of his mother's once pleasant garden, with the stars glinting over his head, and guarded by half-a-dozen troopers, listening to the clash of steel, and the firing going on all round where the little garrison made desperate efforts to maintain themselves. But they could not even grow stronger by joining, for the occupants of each tower were isolated and driven back as they tried to communicate with their officers, who, at the first alarm, tried to lead the men in the guard-room to the gathering point selected in case of emergency. Ben had just lit his lantern, expecting the coming of Roy at twelve, when the first shot came; and, shouting an alarm, he drew his sword to dash out, but only to be hurled back, the door-way of the guard-room being blocked by men; while, when the occupants of the chambers beneath the platforms of each tower tried to descend, they, too, in spite of desperate efforts, were driven upward by the constantly arriving enemies, who forced them on to the leads by the now useless guns. Here, in each case, a desperate encounter went on, which Roy, with his blood running cold, was able to mentally picture, as he stood there listening to the wild shouts of the attacking party, the defiant cries of the garrison--the mere handfuls of men who tried to hold their own. There was no more firing: all was being done with the keen-edged naked blade for a few minutes; and this was followed by a wild despairing cry from the gate tower, and directly after there was a dull, sickening crash which told that a man had been hurled from the parapet into the court-yard, where he lay never to move again. The shock of this was succeeded by others nearly as terrible, as the struggle went on at the tops of the different towers; and cry after cry arose, followed by heavy splash after splash, which, Roy interpreted rightly, meant that the victors were driving the defenders over the battlements into the moat, to sink or swim for life as they could.