recalling it.

To one man, flurried already, and a coward at heart, the name carried a
paralysing assurance of doom. He had seen Basterga fall--by this woman's
hand of all hands in the world--and he had been the first to flee. But
in the lane he tripped over Fabri, he fell headlong, and only raised
himself in time to gain the gateway a few feet in front of the avenging
pikes. Still, he might escape, he hoped to escape, through the gate and
into the open Corraterie. But the first to reach the gates had taken in
hand to shut them, and so to prevent the townsfolk reaching the
Corraterie. One of the great doors, half-closed, blocked his way, and
instinctively--ignorant how far behind him the pike-points were--he
sprang aside into the guard-room.

His one chance now--for he was cut off, and knew it--lay in reaching the
staircase and mounting to the roof. A bound carried him to the door, he
grasped the handle. But a fugitive who had only a second before saved
himself that way, took him for a pursuer, dragged the door close and
held it--held it in spite of his efforts and his imprecations.

Five seconds, ten, perhaps, Grio--for he it was--wasted in struggling
vainly with the door. The man on the other side clung to it with a
despair equal to his own. Five seconds, ten, perhaps; but in that space
of time, short as it was, the man paid smartly for the sins of his life.
When the time of grace had elapsed, with a pike-point a few inches from
his back and the gleaming eyes of an avenging burgher behind it, he fled
shrieking round the table. He might even yet have escaped by a chance;
for all was confusion, and though there was a glare there was no light.
But he stumbled over the body of the man whom he had slain without pity
a few hours before. He fell writhing, and died on the floor, under a
dozen blows, as beasts die in the shambles.

"Mere Royaume! Mere Royaume!" The cry--the last cry he heard--swelled
louder and louder. It swept through the gate, it passed through to the
open, and bore far along the Corraterie, far along the ramparts, ay, to
the open country, the earnest of victory, the earnest of vengeance.

Geneva was saved. He who would have betrayed it, slain like Pyrrhus the
Epirote by a woman's hand, lay dead in the dark lane behind the house in
which he had lived.

CHAPTER XXVI.

THE DAWN.

Anne was but one of some thousands of women who passed through the trial
of that night; who heard the vague sounds