“And we shall die—­together!”

“Yes, together.  But have you the courage?”

“The courage?” she cried, a brave smile lighting the whiteness of her face.  “The courage were needed to live.  The courage were needed to do that.  I am ready, quite ready.  It can be no sin!  To live with that in front of me were the sin!  Come!” For the moment she had forgotten her people, her promise, all!  It seemed to her that death would absolve her from all.  “Come!”

He moved with her under the impulse of her hand until they stood at the gaping window.  The murmur, which he had heard indistinctly a moment before, had grown to a roar of voices.  The mob, on its return eastward along the Rue St. Honore, was nearing the house.  He stood, his arm supporting her, and they waited, a little within the window.  Suddenly he stooped, his face hardly less white than hers:  their eyes met; he would have kissed her.

She did not withdraw from his arm, but she drew back her face, her eyes half shut.

“No!” she murmured.  “No!  While I live I am his.  But we die together, Tignonville!  We die together.  It will not last long, will it?  And afterwards—­”

She did not finish the sentence, but her lips moved in prayer, and over her features came a far-away look; such a look as that which on the face of another Huguenot lady, Philippa de Luns—­vilely done to death in the Place Maubert fourteen years before—­silenced the ribald jests of the lowest rabble in the world.  An hour or two earlier, awed by the abruptness of the outburst, Mademoiselle had shrunk from her fate; she had known fear.  Now that she stood out voluntarily to meet it, she, like many a woman before and since, feared no longer.  She was lifted out of and above herself.

But death was long in coming.  Some cause beyond their knowledge stayed the onrush of the mob along the street.  The din, indeed, persisted, deafened, shook them; but the crowd seemed to be at a stand a few doors down the Rue St. Honore.  For a half-minute, a long half-minute, which appeared an age, it drew no nearer.  Would it draw nearer?  Would it come on?  Or would it turn again?

The doubt, so much worse than despair, began to sap that courage of the man which is always better fitted to do than to suffer.  The sweat rose on Tignonville’s brow as he stood listening, his arm round the girl—­as he stood listening and waiting.  It is possible that when he had said a minute or two earlier that he would rather die a thousand times than live thus shamed, he had spoken beyond the mark.  Or it is possible that he had meant his words to the full.  But in this case he had not pictured what was to come, he had not gauged correctly his power of passive endurance.  He was as brave as the ordinary man, as the ordinary soldier; but martyrdom, the apotheosis of resignation, comes more naturally to women than to men, more hardly to men than to women.  Yet