Then Diana heard the Abbess’s “_Deo gratias_”; heard Lionel curse as his grasp relaxed; heard him curse again as he leaped forward, brandishing the stump of his sword, and, in vain frenzy, striving to stop the fugitives. Harry Rockhurst was the first of the rescuers to dash through the gaping door. The Lord Constable had in truth reached the gateway before him, but had stood aside to let his son pass. Bare-headed, his black curls flying, his face set with the sternness of fierce intent, Diana for one delirious instant took the son for the father—the father as she had first met him in pride of noble strength, when she had loved him, unbidden. And as he sprang toward her, crying out in accents of unmeasurable joy, “Diana—safe!” she cast herself into his arms. Now, even as he held her, she knew who it was, knew that there was youth in his pressure, an unhampered ecstasy of leaping blood. But yet she clung to him the closer, past and present so inextricably mingled in her thought that all she felt, all she cared to know, was that now, here, her heart had come home at last! The inner circle of their joy lasted but the moment of a radiant bubble. About them the turmoil still raged. There was one, within a few yards, white-haired, grappling with a furious blood-stained ruffian. Diana clutched her lover’s arm. “Harry, Harry, save the old man!” Harry turned, saw, and fired his pistol point-blank in the rioter’s face. In the same instant, with a horror that stifled the cry of warning in her throat, Diana saw Lionel, with livid countenance of fury, advancing upon the young man, his broken sword drawn back like a dagger for the thrust. But even as she found voice, all was over: one whose love had been swifter than hers had flung himself between the steel and its aim. Then all was a swirl of confusion. She saw Harry draw his sword from Lionel’s fallen body, fling it from him, and rush with a deep cry of anguish to the tall, white-headed man who yet stood erect, smiling, but with a face of terrible pallor. She looked again; and, as if the blast of a mighty wind had torn the mists from her eyes, she knew him. The old man she had called him: it was Lord Rockhurst himself. And now it became clear to her that he was wounded, and grievously. Though he still stood, he was supported on one side by his son; on the other by a grey-bearded yeoman who, seeing his leader struck, had worked his way to him with great strides, through the mob of soldiers and rioters struggling at the door. “Sir,” he was saying, “this is the weight of a dead man.” “Ah, no!” cried the son. “For God’s sake, look to the wound! O God!—the sword, to the very hilt!” Rockhurst came back from his far-smiling contemplation to forbid the hand that would have plucked the broken sword from his side. “Touch it not yet, Sergeant Bracy. When you draw it, you draw my life with it.” “He’s sped, Master Harry,” whispered Bracy, and his face began to work.