The great chuff howled and blubbered and wriggled under the blows that rained upon him. Presently Ned, exhausted, swung his victim in a hysteric heap upon the ground, and stood to breathe himself. Then it was that the reserve, withdrawn in affright, seeing his momentary fatigue, gathered heart of numbers, and came down upon him in phalanx. He received them, nothing dismayed, and accounted for the first with a “give-upon-the-nose,” and for another with a “poached eye.” He was patently tired, however--enervated by the heat of the day--and his adversaries, recognising this, were encouraging one another to annihilate him, when all in a moment a volume of water slapped into their faces and quenched their ardour for ever. A new champion had come upon the field, and that was no other than Mademoiselle Théroigne with her pitcher. She laughed volubly, on a menacing note, in the washed and streaming countenances. “Beasts, pigs, cowards!” she shrilled. “For one Englishman--name of God!--for one trumpery Englishman to lay you out flat as linen on a bleaching-green! Get back--hide yourselves in your furrows, or play bully to the little rabbits in the field corners! Not to the bucks--that were too bold.” She made as if to follow up the water with the vessel. Ned cried out: “You will break the earthenware sooner than their heads, mademoiselle!” in agony lest she should blaze beyond self-extinguishment, as on the previous evening; but she only stiffened her claws like a cat and prepared to spring. It was enough. The swamped and demoralised crew gathered up its wreckage and fled incontinent, and was in a moment out of sight round the curve. Ned took off his hat to his tutelary divinity--this Athena to his Achilles. “Your weapons were better than mine,” he said; “but your task was harder: for you had to fight against prejudice as well.” The Cagot, still holding his pig by the ear, crept up to the young man and caught and ravenously kissed his hand. Then he looked wistfully at a brown-haired goddess. “Oh, _mon Dieu_, no!” said Théroigne. “You must not touch me or come near me.” She turned and addressed Ned, almost with an entreating sound in her voice:-- “You have courage of every sort, monsieur. But for me--yes, it is as you say. My heart warms to such valour; but I cannot forget in a moment these long traditions--this fear and this abhorrence. Do not let him approach me.” She stepped back, as if to escape a very radiated influence. But she spoke softly to the Englishman, and with the manner of one who in giving help has wrought a little conscious bond of sympathy. “Bid the man go hence by the Liége road,” she said. “So will he evade his persecutors. But a few toises out he can enter the woods and work round to his lair.” “I will see him on his way, mademoiselle.”