wrist), Darnay said, as soon as he could make his
voice heard:

"Friends, you deceive yourselves, or you are deceived. I am not a
traitor."

"He lies!" cried the smith. "He is a traitor since the decree. His life
is forfeit to the people. His cursed life is not his own!"

At the instant when Darnay saw a rush in the eyes of the crowd, which
another instant would have brought upon him, the postmaster turned his
horse into the yard, the escort rode in close upon his horse's flanks,
and the postmaster shut and barred the crazy double gates. The farrier
struck a blow upon them with his hammer, and the crowd groaned; but, no
more was done.

"What is this decree that the smith spoke of?" Darnay asked the
postmaster, when he had thanked him, and stood beside him in the yard.

"Truly, a decree for selling the property of emigrants."

"When passed?"

"On the fourteenth."

"The day I left England!"

"Everybody says it is but one of several, and that there will be
others--if there are not already--banishing all emigrants, and
condemning all to death who return. That is what he meant when he said
your life was not your own."

"But there are no such decrees yet?"

"What do I know!" said the postmaster, shrugging his shoulders; "there
may be, or there will be. It is all the same. What would you have?"

They rested on some straw in a loft until the middle of the night, and
then rode forward again when all the town was asleep. Among the many
wild changes observable on familiar things which made this wild ride
unreal, not the least was the seeming rarity of sleep. After long and
lonely spurring over dreary roads, they would come to a cluster of poor
cottages, not steeped in darkness, but all glittering with lights, and
would find the people, in a ghostly manner in the dead of the night,
circling hand in hand round a shrivelled tree of Liberty, or all drawn
up together singing a Liberty song. Happily, however, there was sleep in
Beauvais that night to help them out of it and they passed on once more
into solitude and loneliness: jingling through the untimely cold and
wet, among impoverished fields that had yielded no fruits of the earth
that year, diversified by the blackened remains of burnt houses, and by
the sudden emergence from ambuscade, and sharp reining up across their
way, of patriot patrols on the watch on all the roads.

Daylight at last found them before the wall of Paris. The barrier was
closed and strongly