For just then a tremendous outcry broke forth, and there was a rush and panic among those who had been leaping round the fire just before. “The guard!—the King’s men!” was the sound they presently distinguished. They could hear rough abusive voices, shrieks and trampling of feet. A few seconds more and all was still, only the fire remained, and in the stillness the suppressed sobs and moans of Aldonza were heard. “A light! Fetch a light from the fire!” said Lucas. Ambrose ran out. The flame was lessening, but he could see the dark bindings, and the blackened pages of the books he loved so well. A corner of a page of St. Augustine’s Confessions was turned towards him and lay on a singed fragment of Aldonza’s embroidered curtain, while a little red flame was licking the spiral folds of the screw, trying, as it were, to gather energy to do more than blacken it. Ambrose could have wept over it at any other moment, but now he could only catch up a brand—it was the leg of his master’s carved chair—and run back with it. Lucas ventured to light a lamp, and they could then see the old man’s face pale, but calm and still, with his long white beard flowing over his breast. There was no blood, no look of pain, only a set look about the eyes; and Aldonza cried “Oh, father, thou art better! Speak to me! Let Master Lucas lift thee up!” “Nay, my child. I cannot move hand or foot. Let me be thus till the Angel of Death come for me. He is very near.” He spoke in short sentences. “Water—nay—no pain,” he added then, and Ambrose ran for some water in the first battered fragment of a tin pot he could find. They bathed his face and he gathered strength after a time to say “A priest!—oh for a priest to shrive and housel me.” “I will find one,” said Ambrose, speeding out into the court over fragments of the beautiful work for which Abenali was hated, and over the torn, half-burnt leaves of the beloved store of Lucas. The fire had died down, but morning twilight was beginning to dawn, and all was perfectly still after the recent tumult, though for a moment or two Ambrose heard some distant cries.