His gorge rose at the sight.  Fear such as he had not before experienced chilled his marrow.  This was hate indeed, a hate before which the strong man quailed; the hate of which Mademoiselle had spoken when she said that the babes crossed themselves at her passing, and the houses tottered to fall upon her!

He paused a minute to recover himself, so deeply had the sight moved him; and as he stood, he wondered if that hate already had its cold eye fixed on him.  Instinctively his gaze searched the opposite wall, but save for two small double-grated windows it was blind; time-stained and stone-built, dark with the ordure of the city lane, it seemed but the back of a house, which looked another way.  The outer gates of an arched doorway were open, and a loaded haycart, touching either side and brushing the arch above, blocked the passage.  His gaze, leaving the windows, dropped to this—­he scanned it a moment; and on a sudden he stiffened.  Between the hay and the arch a hand flickered an instant, then vanished.

Tignonville stared.  At first he thought his eyes had tricked him.  Then the hand appeared again, and this time it conveyed an unmistakable invitation.  It is not from the unknown or the hidden that the fugitive has aught to fear, and Tignonville, after casting a glance down the lane—­which revealed a single man standing with his face the other way—­slipped across and pushed between the hay and the wall.  He coughed.

A voice whispered to him to climb up; a friendly hand clutched him in the act, and aided him.  In a second he was lying on his face, tight squeezed between the hay and the roof of the arch.  Beside him lay a man whose features his eyes, unaccustomed to the gloom, could not discern.  But the man knew him and whispered his name.

“You know me?” Tignonville muttered in astonishment.

“I marked you, M. de Tignonville, at the preaching last Sunday,” the stranger answered placidly.

“You were there?”

“I preached.”

“Then you are M. la Tribe!”

“I am,” the clergyman answered quietly.  “They seized me on my threshold, but I left my cloak in their hands and fled.  One tore my stocking with his point, another my doublet, but not a hair of my head was injured.  They hunted me to the end of the next street, but I lived and still live, and shall live to lift up my voice against this wicked city.”

The sympathy between the Huguenot by faith and the Huguenot by politics was imperfect.  Tignonville, like most men of rank of the younger generation, was a Huguenot by politics; and he was in a bitter humour.  He felt, perhaps, that it was men such as this who had driven the other side to excesses such as these; and he hardly repressed a sneer.

“I wish I felt as sure!” he muttered bluntly.  “You know that all our people are dead?”

“He can save by few or by many,” the preacher answered devoutly.  “We are of the few, blessed be God, and shall see Israel victorious, and our people as a flock of sheep!”