His fears appealed to me in vain. I would scarcely have stirred a finger to save him. But the sight of the two St. Alais standing there pale and irresolute, while that roar of voices grew each moment louder and nearer, moved me. A moment, and the mob would break in; perhaps finding us by Hugues' side, it might in its fury sacrifice all indifferently. It might; and then I heard, to give point to the thought, the crash of one of the doors of the garden as it gave way; and I cried out almost involuntarily that there was another door--another door, if it was open. I did not look to see if they followed, but, leaving the dead, I took the lead, and ran across the sward towards the wall of the Cathedral. The crowd were already pouring into the garden, but a clump of shrubs hid us from them as we fled; and we gained unseen a little door, a low-browed postern in the wall of the apse, that led, I knew--for not long before I had conducted an English visitor over the Cathedral--to a sacristy connected with the crypt. My hope of finding the door open was slight; if I had stayed to weigh the chances I should have thought them desperate. But to my joy as I came up to it, closely followed by the others, it opened of itself, and a priest, showing his tonsured head in the aperture, beckoned to us to hasten. He had little need to do so; in a moment we had obeyed, were by his side, and panting, heard the bolts shoot home behind us. For the moment we were safe. Then we breathed again. We stood in the twilight of a long narrow room with walls and roof of stone, and three loopholes for windows. Du Marc was the first to speak. "_Mon Dieu_, that was close," he said, wiping his brow, which in the cold light wore an ugly pallor. "We are----" "Not out of the wood yet," the surgeon answered gravely, "though we have good grounds for thanking M. le Vicomte. They have discovered us! Yes, they are coming!" Probably the people on the roof had watched us enter and denounced our place of refuge; for as he spoke, we heard a rush of feet, the door shook under a storm of blows, and a score of grimy savage faces showed at the slender arrow-slits, and glaring down, howled and spat curses upon us. Luckily the door was of oak, studded and plated with iron, fashioned in old, rough days for such an emergency, and we stood comparatively safe. Yet it was terrible to hear the cries of the mob, to feel them so close, to gauge their hatred, and know while they beat on the stone as though they would tear the walls with their naked hands, what it would be to fall into their power!