save her yet! I _will_ save her!"

"Fool!" Tavannes answered--but his words were barely audible above the
deafening uproar. "Can you fight a thousand? Look! Look!" and seizing
the other's wrist he pointed to the window.

The street glowed like a furnace in the red light of torches, raised on
poles above a sea of heads; an endless sea of heads, and gaping faces,
and tossing arms which swept on and on, and on and by. For a while it
seemed that the torrent would flow past them and would leave them safe.
Then came a check, a confused outcry, a surging this way and that; the
torches reeled to and fro, and finally, with a dull roar of "Open! Open!"
the mob faced about to the house and the lighted window.

For a second it seemed that even Count Hannibal's iron nerves shook a
little. He stood between the sullen group that surrounded the disordered
table and the maddened rabble, that gloated on the victims before they
tore them to pieces. "Open! Open!" the mob howled: and a man dashed in
the window with his pike.

In that crisis Mademoiselle's eyes met Tavannes' for the fraction of a
second. She did not speak; nor, had she retained the power to frame the
words, would they have been audible. But something she must have looked,
and something of import, though no other than he marked or understood it.
For in a flash he was at the window and his hand was raised for silence.

"Back!" he thundered. "Back, knaves!" And he whistled shrilly. "Do
what you will," he went on in the same tone, "but not here! Pass on!
Pass on!--do you hear?"