What could he do? Resistance was out of the question. "What is it?" he asked, making a show of confronting them. "No matter, young sir," the man who had before taken charge answered gruffly. "Stand you on one side and no harm will happen to you." "But----" "Stand back! Stand back!" the man answered sternly. "We are on no boy's errand!" Then to his party, "Bring the lights," he continued, and advancing to the inner door he unlocked it. "Who has the hammer? Good, do you come first with me. And let the last two stand here and keep the door." He went through without more words, and disappeared up the staircase, followed by his men in single file. The two last remained on guard at the door, and they and Roger waited in the semi-darkness listening to the lumbering tread of the troopers as they stumbled on the wooden stairs, or their weapons clanged against the wall. Roger clenched his hands hard, vowing vengeance; but what could he do? And he had one consolation. Ampoule's death had sobered the men. They would execute their orders, but the fear of outrage and excess which had dwelt on his mind earlier in the evening no longer seemed serious. The sound of the men's feet on the stairs had ceased; he guessed that they were searching the rooms overhead. A moment later their movements made this clear. He heard their returning footsteps and their raised voices in the upper passage. They seemed to confer, and to halt for a minute undecided. Then a door, doubtless the one which led to the roof, was tried, and tried again. But in vain, for the next moment a voice cried harshly, "Open! Open!" and after an interval a crash, twice repeated, proclaimed that the hammer was being brought into use. A scrambling of hasty feet followed, and then silence--doubtless they were crossing the roof--and then a pistol shot! One pistol shot! Roger glared at the men who had been left with him. They opened the door more widely, and stepping through seemed to listen. For a moment the wild notion of locking the door on them, of locking the door on all, occurred to Roger. But he discarded it. CHAPTER IX. SPEEDY JUSTICE. The elder of the Villeneuve brothers was less happy than Roger, in that the Vicomte had passed to him a portion of his crabbed nature. Something of the bitterness, something of the hardness of the father lurked in the son; who in the like unfortunate circumstances might have grown to be such another as his sire, but with more happy surroundings and a better fate still had it in him to become a generous and kindly gentleman.