It was with despairing eyes we looked at the old wooden houses.  They seemed to be bowing themselves towards us, their upper stories projected so far, they were so decrepit.  Their roofs were a wilderness of gutters and crooked gables, of tottering chimneys and wooden pinnacles and rotting beams, Amongst these I judged Kit’s lover was hiding.  Well, it was a good place for hide and seek—­with any other player than death.  In the ground floors of the houses there were no windows and no doors; by reason, I learned afterwards, of the frequent flooding of the river.  But a long wooden gallery raised on struts ran along the front, rather more than the height of a man from the ground, and access to this was gained by a wooden staircase at each end.  Above this first gallery was a second, and above that a line of windows set between the gables.  The block—­it may have run for seventy or eighty yards along the shore—­contained four houses, each with a door opening on to the lower gallery.  I saw indeed that but for the Vidame’s precautions Louis might well have escaped.  Had the mob once poured helter-skelter into that labyrinth of rooms and passages he might with luck have mingled with them, unheeded and unrecognized, and effected his escape when they retreated.

But now there were sentries on each gallery and more on the roof.  Whenever one of the latter moved or seemed to be looking inward—­ where a search party, I understood, were at work—­indeed, if he did but turn his head, a thrill ran through the crowd and a murmur arose, which once or twice swelled to a savage roar such as earlier had made me tremble.  When this happened the impulse came, it seemed to me, from the farther end of the line.  There the rougher elements were collected, and there I more than once saw Bezers’ troopers in conflict with the mob.  In that quarter too a savage chant was presently struck up, the whole gathering joining in and yelling with an indescribably appalling effect: 

  “Hau!  Hau!  Huguenots! 
   Faites place aux Papegots!”

in derision of the old song said to be popular amongst the Protestants.  But in the Huguenot version the last words were of course transposed.

We had worked our way by this time to the front of the line, and looking into one another’s eyes, mutely asked a question; but not even Croisette had an answer ready.  There could be no answer but one.  What could we do?  Nothing.  We were too late.  Too late again!  And yet how dreadful it was to stand still among the cruel, thoughtless mob and see our friend, the touch of whose hand we knew so well, done to death for their sport!  Done to death as the old woman had said like any rat, not a soul save ourselves pitying him!  Not a soul to turn sick at his cry of agony, or shudder at the glance of his dying eyes.  It was dreadful indeed.

“Ah, well,” muttered a woman beside me to her companion—­there were many women in the crowd—­“it is down with the Huguenots, say I!  It is Lorraine is the fine man!  But after all yon is a bonny fellow and a proper, Margot!  I saw him leap from roof to roof over Love Lane, as if the blessed saints had carried him.  And him a heretic!”