He glowered at them in unspeakable rage. Then a man on their side stepped out and stilled the tumult. "Now listen!" said this fellow, a giant, with long black hair falling over a tallowy face. "We will give you three minutes to come out and be piked. Then the women shall go. Skulk there behind them, and we fire on all, and their blood be on your heads." St. Alais stood speechless. At last, "You are fiends!" he cried in a voice of horror. "Would you kill us before their eyes?" "Ay, or in their laps!" the man retorted, amid a roar of laughter. "So decide, decide!" he continued, dancing a clumsy step and tossing a half-pike round his head. "Three minutes by the clock there! Come out, or we fire on all! It will be a dainty pie! A dainty Catholic pie, Messieurs!" St. Alais turned to me, his face white, his eyes staring; and he tried to speak. But his voice failed. And then, of what happened next I cannot tell; for, for a minute, all was blurred. I remember only how the sun lay hot on the wall beyond his face, and how black the lines of mortar showed between the old thin Roman bricks. We were about twenty men and perhaps fifty women, huddled together in a space some forty yards long. Groans burst from the men's lips, and such as had women in their arms--and they were many--leaned against the wall and tried to comfort them, and tried to put them from them. One man cried curses on the dogs who would murder us, and shook his fists at them; and some rained kisses on the pale senseless faces that lay on their breasts--for, thank God, many of the women had fainted; while others, like St. Alais, looked mute agony into eyes that told it again, or clasped a neighbour's hand, and looked up into a sky piteously blue and bright. And I--I do not know what I did, save look into Denise's eyes and look and look! There was no senselessness in them. Remember that the sun shone on all this, and the birds twittered and chirped in the gardens beyond the walls; that it wanted an hour or two of high noon, a southern noon; that in the crease of the valley the Rhone sparkled between its banks, and not far off the sea broke rippling and creaming on the shore of Les Bouches; that all nature rejoiced, and only we--we, pent between those dreadful walls, those scowling faces, saw death imminent--black death shutting out all things. A hand touched me; it was St. Alais' hand. I think, nay, I know, for I read it in his face, that he meant to be reconciled to me. But when I turned to him--or it may be it was the sight of his sister's speechless misery moved him--he had another thought. As the black-haired giant called "One minute gone!" and his following howled, M. le Marquis threw up his hand. "Stay!" he cried, with the old gesture of command. "Stay! There is one man here who is not of us! Let him pass first, and go!" And he pointed to me. "He has no part with us. I swear it!"