out, saith the good Father Pezelay, my master!"

The cripple crossed himself. "Whom God keep," he said. "He is a good
man. But you are looking ill, noble sir?" he continued, peering
curiously at the young Huguenot.

"'Tis the heat," Tignonville muttered. "The night is stifling, and the
lights make it worse. I will go nearer the door."

He hoped to escape them; he had some hope even of escaping from the room
and giving the alarm. But when he had forced his way to the threshold,
he found it guarded by two pikemen; and glancing back to see if his
movements were observed--for he knew that his agitation might have
awakened suspicion--he found that the taller of the two whom he had left,
the black-garbed man with the hungry face, was watching him a-tiptoe,
over the shoulders of the crowd.

With that, and the sense of his impotence, the lights began to swim
before his eyes. The catastrophe that overhung his party, the fate so
treacherously prepared for all whom he loved and all with whom his
fortunes were bound up, confused his brain almost to delirium. He strove
to think, to calculate chances, to imagine some way in which he might
escape from the room, or from a window might cry the alarm. But he could
not bring his mind to a point. Instead, in lightning flashes he foresaw
what must happen: his betrothed in the hands of the murderers; the fair
face that had smiled on him frozen with terror; brave men, the fighters
of Montauban, the defenders of Angely, strewn dead through the dark lanes
of the city. And now a gust of passion, and now a shudder of fear,
seized him; and in any other assembly his agitation must have led to
detection. But in that room were many twitching faces and trembling