"Savoy!" he thundered, "Ville gagnee! The city is ours! Cowards, come on!" And waving his halberd above his head, he beckoned to his followers to advance. Had they done so, had they charged on the instant, they had changed all for him, and perhaps all for Geneva. But they hung a moment, and the next, as in shame they drew themselves together for the charge, their champion stooped forward with a shrill scream. The next instant he received full on his nape a heavy iron pot, that descending with tremendous force from a window above him, rolled from him broken into three pieces. He went down under the blow as if a sledge-hammer had struck him; and so sudden, so dramatic was the fall--his armour clanging about him--that for an instant the two bands held their hands and stood staring, as indifferent crowds stand and gaze in the street. A dozen on the patriots' side knew the house from which the _marmite_ fell, and marked it; and half as many saw at the small window whence it came the grey locks and stern wrinkled face of an aged woman. The effect on the burghers was magical. As if the act symbolised not only the loved ones for whom they fought, but the dire distress to which they were come, they rushed on the foreign men-at-arms with a spirit and a fury hitherto unknown. With a ringing shout of "Mere Royaume! Mere Royaume!"--raised by those who knew the old woman, and taken up by many who did not--they swept the foe, shaken by the fall of their leader, along the narrow Tertasse, pressed on them, and, still shouting the new war-cry, entered the gateway along with them. "Mere Royaume! Mere Royaume!" The name rang savagely in the groining of the arch, echoed dully in the obscurity in which the fierce struggle went on. And men struck to its rhythm, and men died to it. And men who heard it thus and lived never forgot it, nor ever went back in their minds to that night without recalling it. To one man, flurried already, and a coward at heart, the name carried a paralysing assurance of doom. He had seen Basterga fall--by this woman's hand of all hands in the world--and he had been the first to flee. But in the lane he tripped over Fabri, he fell headlong, and only raised himself in time to gain the gateway a few feet in front of the avenging pikes. Still, he might escape, he hoped to escape, through the gate and into the open Corraterie. But the first to reach the gates had taken in hand to shut them, and so to prevent the townsfolk reaching the Corraterie. One of the great doors, half-closed, blocked his way, and instinctively--ignorant how far behind him the pike-points were--he sprang aside into the guard-room.