e
thought of the trap-door--"did you come?"

"By the Tertasse Gate," he explained. "There were but two men on guard,
and they were asleep. I passed them unseen, climbed the stairs to the
leads--I have been up twice before--and crossed the roofs. I knew I
could come this way unseen, and if I had come by the door----"

She understood and cut him short. "Then go as you came and rouse the
watch in the gate!" she cried feverishly. "Rouse them and all, and
Heaven grant you be not too late! Go, Claude, for the love of me, for
the love of God, go quickly!" Her hands on his arm shook with eagerness.
"So that, if there be treachery here----"

"There is treachery!" he said darkly. "Grio----"

"We at least shall have no part in it! You will go? You will go?" she
repeated, clinging to his arm, trembling against him, looking up to him
with eyes which he could not resist. Love wrestled here, on the higher,
the nobler, the unselfish side, and came the stronger out of the
contest. There were tears in his eyes as he answered.

"I will go. You are right, Anne. But you will be alone."

"I run no greater risk than others," she answered. He held her to him,
and their lips met once. And in that instant, her heart beating against
his, she comprehended to what she was sending him, into what peril of
life, into what a dark hell of force and fire and blood; and her arms
clung to him as if she could not let him go. Then, "Go, and God keep
you!" she murmured in a choked voice. And she thrust him from her.

A moment later he was on the roof, and she was kneeling where he had
left her, bowed down, with her face on the bare stairs in an agony of
prayer for him. But not for long; she had her part to do. She hurried
down to the living-room and made sure that the strong shutters were
secured; then up to Basterga's room and to Grio's, and as far as her
strength went she piled the furniture against the iron-barred casements
that looked on to the ramparts. While she worked her ears listened for
the alarm, but, until she had finished and was ascending with the light
to her mother's room she heard nothing. Then a distant cry, a faint
challenge, the drum-drum of running feet, a second cry--and silence. It
might be his death-cry she had heard; and she stood with a white face,
shivering, waiting, bearing the woman's burden of suspense. To lie down
by her mother was impossible; rapine, murder, fire, all the horrors, all
the perils of a city taken by surpri