For it was noon—­or a little more—­of Sunday, August the twenty-fourth, “a holiday, and therefore the people could more conveniently find leisure to kill and plunder.”  From the bridges, and particularly from the stone bridge of Notre Dame—­while they lay safe in that locked room, and Tignonville crouched in his haymow—­Huguenots less fortunate were being cast, bound hand and foot, into the Seine.  On the river bank Spire Niquet, the bookman, was being burnt over a slow fire, fed with his own books.  In their houses, Ramus the scholar and Goujon the sculptor—­than whom Paris has neither seen nor deserved a greater—­were being butchered like sheep; and in the Valley of Misery, now the Quai de la Megisserie, seven hundred persons who had sought refuge in the prisons were being beaten to death with bludgeons.  Nay, at this hour—­a little sooner or a little later, what matters it?—­M. de Tignonville’s own cousin, Madame d’Yverne, the darling of the Louvre the day before, perished in the hands of the mob; and the sister of M. de Taverny, equally ill-fated, died in the same fashion, after being dragged through the streets.

Madame Carlat, then, went not a whit beyond the mark in her argument.  But Mademoiselle had made up her mind, and was not to be dissuaded.

“If I am to be Monsieur’s wife,” she said with quivering nostrils, “shall I fear his servants?”

And opening the door herself, for the others would not, she called.  The man who answered was a Norman; and short of stature, and wrinkled and low-browed of feature, with a thatch of hair and a full beard, he seemed the embodiment of the women’s apprehensions.  Moreover, his patois of the cider-land was little better than German to them; their southern, softer tongue was sheer Italian to him.  But he seemed not ill-disposed, or Mademoiselle’s air overawed him; and presently she made him understand, and with a nod he descended to carry her message.

Then Mademoiselle’s heart began to beat; and beat more quickly when she heard his step—­alas! she knew it already, knew it from all others—­on the stairs.  The table was set, the card must be played, to win or lose.  It might be that with the low opinion he held of women he would think her reconciled to her lot; he would think this an overture, a step towards kinder treatment, one more proof of the inconstancy of the lower and the weaker sex, made to be men’s playthings.  And at that thought her eyes grew hot with rage.  But if it were so, she must still put up with it.  She must still put up with it!  She had sent for him, and he was coming—­he was at the door!

He entered, and she breathed more freely.  For once his face lacked the sneer, the look of smiling possession, which she had come to know and hate.  It was grave, expectant, even suspicious; still harsh and dark, akin, as she now observed, to the low-browed, furrowed face of the rider who had summoned him.  But the offensive look was gone, and she could breathe.