Impatience, hate and wild passion flamed in his face for the moment—­transfiguring it.  Croisette came back to us slowly, white-lipped and quiet.  “Never mind,” I said bitterly.  “The third time may bring luck.”

Not that I felt much indignation at the Vidame’s insult, or any anger with the lad for incurring it; as I had felt on that other occasion.  Life and death seemed to be everything on this morning.  Words had ceased to please and annoy, for what are words to the sheep in the shambles?  One man’s life and one woman’s happiness outside ourselves we thought only of these now.  And some day I reflected Croisette might remember even with pleasure that he had, as a drowning man clutching at straws, stooped to a last prayer for them.

We were placed in the middle of a knot of troopers who closed the line to the right.  And presently Marie touched me.  He was gazing intently at the sentry on the roof of the third house from us; the farthest but one.  The man’s back was to the parapet, and he was gesticulating wildly.

“He sees him!” Marie muttered.

I nodded almost in apathy.  But this passed away, and I started involuntarily and shuddered, as a savage roar, breaking the silence, rang along the front of the mob like a rolling volley of firearms.  What was it?  A man posted at a window on the upper gallery had dropped his pike’s point, and was levelling it at some one inside:  we could see no more.

But those in front of the window could; they saw too much for the Vidame’s precautions, as a moment showed.  He had not laid his account with the frenzy of a rabble, the passions of a mob which had tasted blood.  I saw the line at its farther end waver suddenly and toss to and fro.  Then a hundred hands went up, and confused angry cries rose with them.  The troopers struck about them, giving back slowly as they did so.  But their efforts were in vain.  With a scream of triumph a wild torrent of people broke through between them, leaving them stranded; and rushed in a headlong cataract towards the steps.  Bezers was close to us at the time.  “S’death!” he cried, swearing oaths which even his sovereign could scarce have equalled.  “They will snatch him from me yet, the hell-hounds!”

He whirled his horse round and spurred him in a dozen bounds to the stairs at our end of the gallery.  There he leaped from him, dropping the bridle recklessly; and bounding up three steps at a time, he ran along the gallery.  Half-a-dozen of the troopers about us stayed only to fling their reins to one of their number, and then followed, their great boots clattering on the planks.

My breath came fast and short, for I felt it was a crisis.  It was a race between the two parties, or rather between the Vidame and the leaders of the mob.  The latter had the shorter way to go.  But on the narrow steps they were carried off their feet by the press behind them, and fell over and hampered one another and lost time.  The Vidame, free from this drawback, was some way along the gallery before they had set foot on it.