But Claude did not answer. He was passing through a moment of such misery as he had never experienced. To give way to them now, to lower his flag before them after he had challenged them! To abandon her to them, to see her--oh, it was more than he could do, more than he could suffer! It was---- "Pray go on," Basterga sneered, "if you have not said your say. Do not think of us!" Oh, bitter! But he remembered how the scalding liquor had fallen on the tender skin. "I have said it," he muttered hoarsely. "I have said it," and by a movement of his hand, pathetic enough had any understood it, he seemed to withdraw himself and his opposition. But when, obedient to Basterga's eye, the girl moved to Gentilis' side and bent her cheek--which flamed, not by reason of Gentilis or the coming kisses, but of Claude's presence and his cry for her--he could not bear it. He could not stay and see it, though to go was to abandon her perhaps to worse treatment. He rose with a cry and snatched his cap, and tore open the door. With rage in his heart and their laughter, their mocking, triumphant laughter, in his ears, he sprang down the steps. A coward! That was what he must seem to them. A coward's part, that was the part they had seen him play. Into the darkness, into the night, what mattered whither, when such fierce anger boiled within him? Such self-contempt. What mattered whither when he knew how he had failed! Ay, failed and played the Tissot! The Tissot and the weakling! CHAPTER VIII. ON THE THRESHOLD. He hurried along the ramparts in a rage with those whom he had left, in a still greater rage with himself. He had played the Tissot with a vengeance. He had flown at them in weak passion, he had recoiled as weakly, he had left them to call him coward. Now, even now, he was fleeing from them, and they were jeering at him. Ay, jeering at him; their laughter followed him, and burned his ears. The rain that beat on his fevered face, the moist wind from the Rhone Valley below, could not wipe out _that_--the defeat and the shame. The darkness through which he hurried could not hide it from his eyes. Thus had Tissot begun, flying out at them, fleeing from them, a thing of mingled fury and weakness. He knew how they had regarded Tissot. So they now regarded him.