They were fortunate indeed, for a few seconds later they had been too late.  The alarm had preceded them.  As they dashed up, a man ran to the chains of the portcullis and tried to lower it.  He failed to do so at the first touch, and, quailing, fled from Badelon’s levelled pistol.  A watchman on one of the bastions of the wall shouted to them to halt or he would fire:  but the riders yelled in derision, and thundering through the echoing archway, emerged into the open, and saw, extended before them, in place of the gloomy vistas of the Black Town, the glory of the open country and the vine-clad hills, and the fields about the Loire yellow with late harvest.

The women gasped their relief, and one or two who were most out of breath would have pulled up their horses and let them trot, thinking the danger at an end.  But a curt savage word from the rear set them flying again, and down and up and on again they galloped, driven forward by the iron hand which never relaxed its grip of them.  Silent and pitiless he whirled them before him until they were within a mile of the long Ponts de Ce—­a series of bridges rather than one bridge—­and the broad shallow Loire lay plain before them, its sandbanks grilling in the sun, and grey lines of willows marking its eyots.  By this time some of the women, white with fatigue, could only cling to their saddles with their hands; while others were red-hot, their hair unrolled, and the perspiration mingled with the dust on their faces.  But he who drove them had no pity for weakness in an emergency.  He looked back and saw, a half-mile behind them, the glitter of steel following hard on their heels:  and “Faster! faster!” he cried, regardless of their prayers:  and he beat the rearmost of the horses with his scabbard.  A waiting-woman shrieked that she should fall, but he answered ruthlessly, “Fall then, fool!” and the instinct of self-preservation coming to her aid, she clung and bumped and toiled on with the rest until they reached the first houses of the town about the bridges, and Badelon raised his hand as a signal that they might slacken speed.

The bewilderment of the start had been so great that it was then only, when they found their feet on the first link of the bridge, that two of the party, the Countess and Tignonville, awoke to the fact that their faces were set southwards.  To cross the Loire in those days meant much to all:  to a Huguenot, very much.  It chanced that these two rode on to the bridge side by side, and the memory of their last crossing—­the remembrance that, on their journey north a month before, they had crossed it hand-in-hand with the prospect of passing their lives together, and with no faintest thought of the events which were to ensue, flashed into the mind of each of them.  It deepened the flush which exertion had brought to the woman’s cheek, then left it paler than before.  A minute earlier she had been wroth with her old lover; she had held him accountable for the outbreak in the town and this hasty retreat; now her anger died as she looked and she remembered.  In the man, shallower of feeling and more alive to present contingencies, the uppermost emotion as he trod the bridge was one of surprise and congratulation.