The cry was caught up by the crowd. “The oath of Marion—the oath of Marion!” rung from a hundred voices: and the assailants, with that cry, rushed on the royal troops like an avalanche rushes from the sky. But foremost of all rode Preston and his serjeant, while their terror-struck enemies around them went down, with every sweep of their good swords, like grain on a harvest-field. The royal troops broke in every direction. The officers, seeing resistance was vain before so headlong a charge, turned also to seek safety in flight. Col. Campbell, however, seemed disposed to stand his ground, but Macdonald riding his powerful steed against him bore him down, and the next instant the commandant, to save his life, yielded himself a prisoner. It was at this moment that Major Lindsay saw, for the first time, the face of Preston. With an oath, hissed between his teeth, he snatched a fire-lock from a dead soldier beside him, and pointed it at our hero, who, not perceiving him, would infallibly have fallen, but that his name uttered in a shriek by Kate arrested his ear, and turning he beheld his enemy, who was almost in a line with the window whence the warning had been heard. The lightning that rives the oak is not quicker than was the blow from Preston’s sabre. Down, right on the head of his adversary, descended the heavy steel, crashing through the skull as if it had been only so much paper: and with that blow, the soul of the villain and assassin went to his long account. Kate saw no more. She scarcely indeed saw that. She only knew that her lover had been warned in time, and had escaped; for her father now drew her forcibly in, and shut the perilous casement, around which the pistol balls were rattling like hail. Then she swooned away. The rest of that night is matter of history. The town was, for a while, wholly in the hands of the assailants, and the victory would have been complete but for some misapprehension in the hour at which the different detachments were to attack, which enabled a part of the enemy to gain their garrison, where they were too strongly entrenched to be taken without artillery. The assailants accordingly retired after having captured the town and made Col. Campbell prisoner. Preston had heard Kate’s voice, and, leaving his lieutenant to pursue the fugitives, sought her out immediately. His were the eyes she first looked on when she recovered from her swoon. Her glad surprise, or his own joy to find her still his own when he had feared their arrival was too late, we must leave to the imagination of the reader. It was one of those scenes human language is too feeble to portray. When, toward daybreak, Marion gave orders for the town to be evacuated, Kate, so late fainting and heart-broken, took her place on horse-back between her father and Preston, almost as rosy-looking and happy as ever. A spectator could scarcely have recognized in her the pale and drooping lily of the evening before.