he causeway, black against the western sky,
rose the gateway and towers of Vrillac; and he saw that, as the Countess
had said, it was a place ten men could hold against ten hundred!

They stumbled down the beach, reached the causeway and trotted along it;
more slowly now, and looking back. The other women had followed by hook
or by crook, some crying hysterically, yet clinging to their horses and
even urging them; and in a medley, the causeway clear behind them and no
one following, they reached the drawbridge, and passed under the arch of
the gate beyond.

There friendly hands, Carlat's foremost, welcomed them and aided them to
alight, and the Countess saw, as in a dream, the familiar scene, all
unfamiliar: the gate, where she had played, a child, aglow with lantern-
light and arms. Men, whose rugged faces she had known in infancy, stood
at the drawbridge chains and at the winches. Others blew matches and
handled primers, while old servants crowded round her, and women looked
at her, scared and weeping. She saw it all at a glance--the lights, the
black shadows, the sudden glow of a match on the groining of the arch
above. She saw it, and turning swiftly, looked back the way she had
come; along the dusky causeway to the low, dark shore, which night was
stealing quickly from their eyes. She clasped her hands.

"Where is Badelon?" she cried. "Where is he? Where is he?"

One of the men who had ridden before her answered that he had turned
back.

"Turned back!" she repeated. And then, shading her eyes, "Who is
coming?" she asked, her voice insistent. "There is some one coming. Who
is it? Who is it?"

Two were coming out of the gloom, travelling slowly and painfully along
the causeway. One was La Tribe, limping; the other a rider, slashed
across the forehead, and sobbing curses.

"No more!" she muttered. "Are there no more?"

The minister shook his head. The rider wiped the blood from his eyes,
and turned up his face that he might see the better. But he seemed to be
dazed, and only babbled strange words in a strange _patois_.

She stamped her foot in passion. "More lights!" she cried. "Lights! How
can they find their way? And let six men go down the _digue_, and meet
them. Will you let them be butchered between the shore and this?"

But Carlat, who had not been able to collect more than a dozen men, shook
his head; and before she could repeat the order, sounds of battle,
shrill, faint, like cr