“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.
In the meantime, racing breathlessly, the two boys watched the drifting of the white enemy parachutes across the sky. It had seemed at first that they would land not so far from the spot where they had stood. But a brisk wind carried them farther and farther away.
“It’s going to be a race,” Brand panted, “but we’ve just got to make it. They may—may be spies. They—they must not escape!”