hem to force them to
descend.

Claude shuddered as he listened, as he waited, his pike still levelled;
shuddered at the pitiful groaning that issued from the blackness,
shuddered at the blows he had struck, and the scream that still echoed
in his ears. He had not trembled when he fought, but he trembled at the
thought of it.

"They are beaten," he muttered huskily.

"Ay, they are beaten!" Marcadel--he who had trembled before the
fight--answered with exultation. "You were right. We wanted no more men!
But it was near. If this rogue had not tripped our throats would have
suffered."

"He was a brave man," Claude answered, leaning heavily on his pike. He
needed its support.

Marcadel knelt down and felt the man over. "Ay," he said, "he was, to
give the devil his due! And that reminds me. We've a skulker here who
has escaped so far. He shall play his part now. We must have their arms,
but it is dirty work groping in the dark for them; and maybe life enough
in one of them to drive a dagger between one's ribs. He shall do it.
Where is he?"

Claude was feeling the reaction which ensues upon intense excitement. He
did not answer. Nor did he interfere when Marcadel, pouncing on Louis,
where he crouched in the darkest corner, forced him forward to the head
of the staircase. There the lad fell on his knees weeping futilely,
wailing prayers. But the guard kicked him forward.

"In!" he said. "You know what you have to do! In, and strip them! Do you
hear? And if you leave as much as a knife----"

"I won't! I daren't!" Louis screamed. And grovelling on his face on the
leads he clung to whatever offered itself.

But men who have just passed through a life and death struggle, are
hard. "You won't?" Marcadel answered, applying his boot brutally, but
without effect. "You will! Or you will feel my pike between your ribs!
In! In, my lad!"

A scream answered each repetition of the word, and proved that the
threat was no empty one. Claude might have intervened, but he remembered
Anne and the humiliations she had suffered in this craven's presence.

"In!" Marcadel repeated a third time. "And if you leave so much as a
knife upon them I will throw you off the tower. You understand, do you?
Then in, and strip them!"

And driven by sheer torture--for the pike had thrice drawn blood from
his writhing body--Louis crept, weeping and quaking, into the staircase;
and on one of her tormentors Anne was avenged. But Claude was thinking
mor