One look, and she crumpled down on the stile steps to burst into a flood of tears, tears of pure joy. All gay in red and blue calico Tillie and Peggy stood in the farmhouse doorway. A moment more and they had left the house to come racing toward Cherry. In the meantime the fighting planes had gone beyond the hill, quite out of her sight. Soon she was hugging two tumble-haired young sprites to her bosom, and exclaiming: “Tillie! Peggy! You are safe! I was, Oh! So afraid!” “But the playhouse is all blowed up.” Tillie dabbed at her eyes. “Yes!” exclaimed Peggy, dancing a jig. “But were we bombed! And was it exciting! Just like fireworks! Only bigger! Much louder! There was smoke, and then Oops! Up went everything!” In vast astonishment Cherry stared at this small bit of humanity from the slums of London. Her eyes were on the child for a full minute. Then, mustering up her courage she managed a low chuckle. Then, springing to her feet, she cried: “Come on! Let’s go see! We’ll make it a race!” And so the four of them, three girls and a dog, went racing away. When at last they stood by the ruins of what had once been a grand playhouse, almost a living thing to her, Cherry was ready to weep. How very much that playhouse had meant to her! It was only an abandoned smoke-house, with the pleasant odor of burning wood and smoking meat still clinging to it, but she had made of it a sort of second home. What grand times she and Alice had known there! And of late, how Tillie and Peggy had gloried in it! They had called it “Home of our Dolls.” “The dolls!” Cherry exclaimed as she recalled it all. “Where are they?” As if in answer to her appeal, the dog, Flash, went racing about to return almost at once with the remains of a doll held lightly between his teeth. “Oh! Poor Wilhelmina!” Peggy cried. “She has lost her head!” “Yes,” said a sober voice behind her. “And if those terrible Nazis had succeeded as they hoped to, in dropping a bomb on our house you and I would have been minus our heads too.” It was a tall, strongly built girl in her late teens who spoke. She wore a blue calico apron. Her hands were white with flour. “Alice!” Cherry demanded, as a look of terror came into her eyes. “Do you really think they meant to bomb the house?” “Of course they did!” “Why? What have we done?” “They did it because we belong to England. They hate all of England. They will destroy every bit of England if they can!” The girl’s voice rose. “But they can’t! They shall not. There will always be an England!” At that moment the plain, strongly built girl with flour on her hands appeared transformed. No Joan of Arc could have looked stronger, more daring, than she. Cherry looked at the headless doll and was silent.