"Choose! Mademoiselle, and quickly!" he said. "For I can only save my

wife and her people! Quick, for the pinch is coming, and 'twill be no

boy's play."

A shot, a scream from the street, a rush of racing feet before the window

seconded his words.

"Quick, Mademoiselle!" he cried. And his breath came a little faster.

"Quick, before it be too late! Will you save life, or will you kill?"

She looked at her lover with eyes of agony, dumbly questioning him. But

he made no sign, and only Tavannes marked the look.

"Monsieur has done what he can to save himself," he said, with a sneer.

"He has donned the livery of the King's servants; he has said, 'Whoever

perishes, I will live!' But--"

"Curse you!" the young man cried, and, stung to madness, he tore the

cross from his cap and flung it on the ground. He seized his white

sleeve and ripped it from shoulder to elbow. Then, when it hung by the

string only, he held his hand.

"Curse you!" he cried furiously. "I will not at your bidding! I may

save her yet! I will save her!"

"Fool!" Tavannes answered--but his words were barely audible above the

deafening uproar. "Can you fight a thousand? Look! Look!" and seizing

the other's wrist he pointed to the window.

The street glowed like a furnace in the red light of torches, raised on

poles above a sea of heads; an endless sea of heads, and gaping faces,

and tossing arms which swept on and on, and on and by. For a while it

seemed that the torrent would flow past them and would leave them safe.

Then came a check, a confused outcry, a surging this way and that; the

torches reeled to and fro, and finally, with a dull roar of "Open! Open!"

the mob faced about to the house and the lighted window.

For a second it seemed that even Count Hannibal's iron nerves shook a

little. He stood between the sullen group that surrounded the disordered

table and the maddened rabble, that gloated on the victims before they

tore them to pieces. "Open! Open!" the mob howled: and a man dashed in

the window with his pike.

In that crisis Mademoiselle's eyes met Tavannes' for the fraction of a

second. She did not speak; nor, had she retained the power to frame the

words, would they have been audible. But something she must have looked,

and something of import, though no other than he marked or understood it.

For in a flash he was at the window and his hand was raised for silence.

"Back!" he thundered. "Back, knaves!" And he whistled shrilly. "Do

what you will," he went on in the same tone, "but not here! Pass on!

Pass on!--do you hear?"




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