She stood by the flagstaff with a pistol in her hand. But her hand hung stiffly by her hip as it had dropped at the sound of his shout, and her eyes stared on him. At her feet lay the Commandant, his hand still rigid upon the halliards, his breast covered by the folds of the fallen flag, and behind her, as the bursting shell had killed and huddled it, the body of old Sergeant Bedard. Why she stood there, pistol in hand, he could partly guess. How these two corpses came here he could not guess at all. The Commandant, mortally wounded, had grasped at the falling flag, and with a dying effort had bent it upon the spare halliards and tried to hoist. It lay now, covering a wound which had torn his chest open, coat and flesh, and laid his ribs bare. But John a Cleeve, kneeling upon the hatchway, understood nothing of this. What beat on his brain was the vision of a face below--the face of the officer commanding--turned upwards in blank astonishment at his shout of "Forty-sixth! This way, Forty-sixth!" The Indians were battering the hatch with their musket-butts. The bolt shook. He pressed his weight down on the edge, keeping his head well back to be out of the way of bullets. Luckily the timbers of the hatch were stout, and moreover it had a leaden casing, but this would avail nothing when the Indians began to fire at the hinges--as they surely would. He found himself saying aloud in French, "Run, mademoiselle!--I won't answer for the hinges. Call again to the red-coats! They will help." But still, while blow after blow shook the hatch, Diane crouched motionless, staring at him with wild eyes. "They will help," he repeated with the air of one striving to speak lucidly; then with a change of tone, "Give me your pistol, please." She held it out obediently, at arm's length; but as he took it she seemed to remember, and crept close. "Non--non!" she whispered. "C'est a moi-que tu le dois, enfin!" From the staircase--not close beneath the hatch, but, as it seemed, far below their feet--came the muffled sound of shots, and between the shots hoarse cries of rage. "Courage!" whispered John. He could hear that men were grappling and fighting down there, and supposed the Forty-sixth to be at hand. He could not know that the parleyers at the gate, appalled for an instant by the vision of Diane with a dozen savages in chase, had rallied at a yell from Dominique Guyon, pelted after him to the rescue, and were now at grips with the rearmost Oneidas--a locked and heaving mass choking the narrow spirals of the stairway. "Courage!" he whispered again, and pressing a knee on the edge of the hatch reached out a hand to steady her. What mattered it if they died now--together--he and she? "_Tu dois_"--she loved him; her lips had betrayed her. "_Tu dois_"--the words sang through him, thrilling, bathing him in bliss. "O my love! O my love!"