shrieking from a doorway by the hair, nor look back at that other
scream when a dragoon, unmanned and overwrought, reined from the
ranks and cut her assailant down.

At one point the crowd was thick about the gate of a walled
courtyard, thundering on it with crowbars and axes; here, again, the
Prince paused to look sharply among them, lest somewhere there might
be a brown head and a pale clear-cut face that he sought. Even as he
tightened his bridle, the gate gave rendingly; he turned his head as
the mob, roaring, poured in. For the space of perhaps a second he sat
motionless and stricken, but it was long enough to see what he never
forgot--a woman, composed, serene, bright against her dark background
in the shifting light of the burning house, gay in saffron and white.
Then the mob surged before her and hid her, and his voice returned to
him.

"Charge!" he roared, and tore his sword out.

The dragoons, eager enough, followed him; the courtyard overflowed
with them as their great horses thundered in at the gate, and the
long swords got to their work on that packed and cornered throng.
There were swift bitter passages as the troopers cleared the place--
episodes such as only Jews knew till then, ghastly killings of men
who crawled among the horses' feet and were hunted out to be
slaughtered. And in the middle of it, the Prince was on his knees,
holding up a brown head in the crook of his arm, seeing nothing of
the butchery at his elbow.

It was when the killing was done, and the dragoons were clearing the
street, that there arrived on tiptoe Monsieur Vaucher, searching