"The Prince fought so well that her hopes rose for the moment, and she almost trusted that he might beat the assailants off for ever such a little time, when she could have given him his pistols, and indeed the pair of them have barricaded themselves behind the stout door at the head of the staircase. But the villains were crafty, and two of them charging up the stairs at once, one received her brother's point, while the other fired his pistol right against the Prince's heart, killing him on the spot. They then prepared to risk the remaining stairs; but the brave Princess called out to them from her post round the corner, that she had a pistol and would apply it to the first, in the way in which they killed her brother. This checked their ardour. They had been encouraged in their attack on the Prince by having firearms, whilst he had none. But now the case was changed: the first man up the steps would certainly be killed, and none would be the first. And there they stood, huddled on the stair, with beads of sweat dropping off their foreheads as they wavered between fear of a desperate woman and greed for the reward offered for me--alive or dead. "Presently they determined to make a united rush, to leave it uncertain who should be killed. And perhaps only with the idea of daunting her, but I believe in cowardly fiendishness, they swore with horrible imprecations to revenge the death of the one who should fall with murder and the worst outrages that could be perpetrated on a woman. But the Princess did not waver, and up the stairs they came, one paying the penalty of his life to her courage, while the others flung themselves on her and tied her hands, lest she should have another weapon. Then they gagged her; and then, with the cruelty which is almost an instinct with the lower-class Sicilians, they tied her feet together, and forcing her on her knees, from which she could not in her bonds rise, stood round her, waiting for her fears to torture her, and forgetting me for a few moments, while they gloated on a woman's terror and agony, and disputed as to the outrages which should be inflicted on her. "While they stood thus, helter skelter up the marble steps flew Will Hardres, followed by a dozen or more English officers; and those who had taken counsel before they would face a woman felt at their backs the vengeance of the terrible English, who would have dashed into them had they been ten to one. Their shrieks, the most appalling cries of terror that any of my officers present had ever heard, rent the vaulted chamber of the ancient palace. The next instant Will's eye fell on the Princess kneeling in her bonds, and there was not another thought of mercy in his soul, as with a fierce thrust through the back he reached the heart of the captain of the band, and slashed off the ear of the next as he dealt the deadly cut between the neck and the shoulder.