int, to fall, to fling herself into his arms
in gratitude; prepared for everything but this self-forgetfulness.
"Water?" he said doubtfully, "but had you not better--take some wine,
Anne?"

"To wash! To wash!" she replied sharply, almost angrily. "How can I go
to her in this state? And do you shut the shutters."

A stone had that moment passed through a pane of one of the windows. The
rout of women were gathering before the house; the step she advised was
plainly necessary. Fortunately the Royaumes' house, like all in the
Corraterie--which formed an inner line of defence pierced by the
Tertasse gate--had outside shutters of massive thickness, capable of
being lowered from within. He closed these in haste and found, when he
turned from the task and looked for her--a small round hole in each
shutter made things dimly visible--that she was gone to soothe her
mother.

He could not but love her the more for it. He could not but respect her
the more for her courage, for her thoughtfulness, her self-denial. But
when the heart is full and would unburden itself, when the brain teems
with pent-up thoughts, when the excitement of action and of peril wanes
and the mind would fain tell and hear and compare and remember--then to
be alone, to be solitary, is to sink below one's self.

For a time, while his pulses still beat high, while the heat of battle
still wrought in him, and the noise without continued, and there seemed
a prospect of things to be done, he stood up against this. Thump! Thump!
They were stoning the shutters. Let them! He placed the settle across
the hearth, and in this way cut off the firelight that might have
betrayed those in the room to eyes peeping through the holes. By-and-by
the shrill vixenish cries rose louder, he caught the sound of voices in
altercation, and of hoarse orders: and slowly and reluctantly the babel
seemed to pass away. An anxious moment followed: fearfully he listened
for the knock of the law, the official summons which must make all his
efforts useless. But it did not come.

It was when the silence which ensued had lasted some minutes that the
strangeness and aloofness of his position in this darkened room began to
weigh on his spirits. His eyes had adapted themselves to the gloom, and
he could make out the shapes of the furniture. But it was morning! It
was day! Outside, the city was beginning to go about its ordinary work,
its ordinary life. The streets were filling, the classes were