He came out, and some of the young women and most of the young men, who
had dimly known of him as a sort of celebrity, and suspected him of being
a prig, were reconciled, and accepted him for a nice fellow, and became
of his opinion as to the details of the amusement before them.

It was not very Homeric, when it came off, or very mediaeval, but it was
really lots of fun, or far more fun than one would have thought. The
storming of the castle was very sincere, and the fortress was honestly
defended. Miss Macroyd was made umpire, as she wished, and provided with
a large snowball to sit on at a safe distance; as she was chosen by the
men, the girls wanted to have an umpire of their own, who would be really
fair, and they voted Verrian into the office. But he refused, partly
because he did not care about being paired off with Miss Macroyd so
conspicuously, and partly because he wished to help the fight along.

Attacks were made and repelled, and there were feats of individual and
collective daring on the side of the defenders which were none the less
daring because the assailants stopped to cheer them, and to disable
themselves by laughing at the fury of the foe. A detachment of the young
men at last stormed the castle and so weakened its walls that they
toppled inward; then the defenders, to save themselves from being buried
under the avalanche, swarmed out into the open and made the entire force
of the enemy prisoners.

The men pretended that this was what might have been expected from the
beginning, but by this time the Berserker madness had possessed Miss
Macroyd, too; she left her throne of snow and came forward shouting that
it had been perfectly fair, and that the men had been really beaten, and
they had no right to pretend that they had given themselves up purposely.