She pushed him unceremoniously aside at the head of the stairs and ran past him. Long concealment of the deadly poverty within the walls had taught her to close the gates behind her whenever she entered, but now for greater security, or to gain time, she swung the great oaken beam round on its pivot across the doors on the inside. Then turning round on her heels she watched the bell that hung above her head. The Abbé, who had followed her as quickly as he could, was naively looking for a peep-hole between the timbers of the huge doors. A minute later the bell swung slowly, and gave a single clang which echoed beneath the vaulted roof, and in the hollow of the empty towers on either side. "Marie, Marie!" cried a gay girlish voice from without. "Open at once. It is I." "There," said Marie, in a whisper. "It is Mademoiselle, who has returned from the good Sisters. And the story that you told of the fever at Saintes is true." CHAPTER XIII WITHIN THE GATES The great bell hanging inside the gates of Gemosac was silent for two days after the return of Juliette de Gemosac from her fever-stricken convent school, at Saintes. But on the third day, soon after nightfall, it rang once more, breaking suddenly in on the silence of the shadowy courts and gardens, bidding the frogs in the tank be still with a soft, clear voice, only compassed by the artificers who worked in days when silver was little accounted of in the forging of a bell. It was soon after eight o'clock, and darkness had not long covered the land and sent the workers home. There was no moon. Indeed, the summons to the gate, coming so soon after nightfall, seemed to suggest the arrival of a traveller, who had not deemed it expedient to pass through the winding streets of Gemosac by daylight. The castle lies on a height, sufficiently removed from the little town to temper the stir of its streets to a pleasant and unobtrusive evidence of neighbourhood. Had the traveller come in a carriage, the sound of its wheels would certainly have been heard; and nearer at hand, the tramp of horses on the hollow of the old drawbridge, not raised these hundred years, must have heralded the summons of the bell. But none of these sounds had warned Juliette de Gemosac, who sat alone in the little white room upstairs, nor Marie and her husband, dumb and worn by the day's toil, who awaited bedtime on a stone seat by the stable door. Juliette, standing at the open window, heard Jean stir himself, and shuffle, in his slippers, toward the gate. "It is some one who comes on foot," she heard Marie say. "Some beggar--the roads are full of them. See that he gets no farther than the gate."