her fate at their hands. She paused then, with her fingers on the key;
but not for long. She remembered that, before she descended, she had
heard neither shot nor cry. Resistance therefore had ceased, and that of
a single house, held by two helpless women, could avail nothing, could
but excite to fury and reprisals.

She turned the key and opened. The lights dazzled her. The doorway, as
she stood faltering, almost fainting, before it, seemed to be full of
grotesque dancing faces, some swathed in bandages, others
powder-blackened, some hot with excitement, others pallid with fatigue.
They were such faces, piled one above the other, as are seen in bad
dreams.

On the intruders' side, those who pressed in first saw a girl strangely
quiet, who held the door wide for them. "My mother is ill," she said in
a voice that strove for composure; if they were the enemy, her only
hope, her only safety, lay in courage. "And she is old," she continued.
"Do not harm her."

"We come to do harm neither to you nor to her," a voice replied. And the
foremost of the troop, a thick dwarfish man with a huge two-handed
sword, stood aside. "Messer Baudichon," he said to one behind him, "this
is the daughter."

She knew the fat, sturdy councillor--who in Geneva did not?--and through
her stupor she recognised him, although a great bandage swathed half his
head, and he was pale. And, beginning to have an inkling that things
were well, she began also to tremble. By his side stood Messer
Petitot--she knew him, too, he had been Syndic the year before--and a
man in hacked and blood-stained armour with his arm in a sling and his
face black with powder. These three, and behind them a dozen others--men
whom she had seen on high days robed in velvet, but who now wore, one
and all, the ugly marks of that night's work--looked on her with a
strange benevolence. And Baudichon took her hand.

"We do not come to harm you," he said. "On the contrary we come to thank
you and yours. In the name of the city of Geneva, and of all those here
with me----"

"Ay! Ay!" shouted Jehan Brosse, the tailor. And he rang his sword on the
doorstep. "Ay! Ay!"

"We come to thank you for the blow struck this night from this house!
That it rid us of one of our worst foes was a small thing, girl. But
that it put heart into our burghers and strength into their arms at a
critical moment was another and a greater thing. Which shall not, if
Geneva stand--as stand by God's pleasure