UARY

Into the late afternoon of that endless day of horror with its perpetual
alarms, its volleying musketry, rolling drums, and distant muttering
of angry multitudes, Mme. de Plougastel and Aline sat waiting in that
handsome house in the Rue du Paradis. It was no longer for Rougane they
waited. They realized that, be the reason what it might--and by now many
reasons must no doubt exist--this friendly messenger would not return.
They waited without knowing for what. They waited for whatever might
betide.

At one time early in the afternoon the roar of battle approached them,
racing swiftly in their direction, swelling each moment in volume and in
horror. It was the frenzied clamour of a multitude drunk with blood and
bent on destruction. Near at hand that fierce wave of humanity checked
in its turbulent progress. Followed blows of pikes upon a door and
imperious calls to open, and thereafter came the rending of timbers,
the shivering of glass, screams of terror blending with screams of rage,
and, running through these shrill sounds, the deeper diapason of bestial
laughter.

It was a hunt of two wretched Swiss guardsmen seeking blindly to escape.
And they were run to earth in a house in the neighbourhood, and there
cruelly done to death by that demoniac mob. The thing accomplished, the
hunters, male and female, forming into a battalion, came swinging down
the Rue du Paradis, chanting the song of Marseilles--a song new to Paris
in those days:

Allons, enfants de la patrie!
Le jour de gloire est arrive
Contre nous de la tyrannie
L'etendard sanglant est leve.

Nearer it came, raucously bawled by some hundreds of voices, a dread
sound that had come so suddenly to displace at least temporarily
the merry, trivial air of the "Ca ira!" which hitherto had been the
revolutionary carillon. Instinctively Mme. de Plougastel and Aline clung
to each other. They had heard the sound of the ravishing of that other
house in the neighbourhood, without knowledge of the reason. What if now
it should be the turn of the Hotel Plougastel! There was no real
cause to fear it, save that amid a turmoil imperfectly understood and
therefore the more awe-inspiring, the worst must be feared always.

The dreadful song so dreadfully sung, and the thunder of heavily shod
feet upon the roughly paved street, passed on and receded. They breathed
again, almost as if a miracle had saved them, to yield to fresh alarm an
instant later,