And for him, she might have been the weakest of the weak, and fickle and changeable as the weather, she might have been all that she was not—though he had yet to learn that and how she had carried herself that night—but he knew that in spite of all he loved her. She had the old charm for him! She was still the one woman in the world for him! And she was in peril. But for that there is no knowing how long he might have held her. That thought, however, presently overcame all others, made him insensible even to the sweetness of that embrace, ay, even put words in his mouth. “How come you here?” he cried. “How come you here, Mary?” She freed herself and pointed to her mother. “I am with her,” she said. “We had to bring her here. It was all we could do.” He lowered his eyes and saw what she was guarding; and he understood something of the tragedy of that night. From the couch came a low continuous moaning which made the hair rise on his head. He looked at Mary. “She is insensible,” she said quietly. “She does not know anything.” “We must remove her!” he said. She looked at him, and from him to that part of the Square where the rioters wrought still at their fiendish work. And she shuddered. “Where can we take her?” she answered. “They are beginning to burn that side also.” “Then we must remove them!” he answered sternly. “That’s sense!” a hearty voice cried at his elbow. “And the first I’ve heard this night!” On which he became aware of Miss Sibson, or rather of a stout body swathed in queer wrappings, who spoke in the schoolmistress’s tones, and though pale with fatigue continued to show a brave face to the mischief about her. “That’s talking!” she continued. “Do that, and you’ll do a man’s work!” “Will you have courage if I leave you?” he asked. And when Mary, bravely but with inward terror, answered “Yes,” he told her in brief sentences—with his eyes on the movements in the Square—what to do, if the rabble made a rush in that direction, and what to do, if the troops charged too near them, and how, by lying down, to avoid danger if the crowd resorted to firearms, since untrained men fired high. Then he touched Miss Sibson on the arm. “You’ll not leave her?” he said. “God bless the man, no!” the schoolmistress replied. “Though, for the matter of that, she’s as well able to take care of me as I of her!” Which was not quite true. Or why in after-days did Miss Sibson, at many a cosy whist-party and over many a glass of hot negus, tell of a particular box on the ear with which she routed a young rascal, more forward than civil? Ay, and dilate with boasting on the way his teeth had rattled, and the gibes with which his fellows had seen him driven from the field?