Meanwhile Tignonville, after putting a hundred yards between himself and his bedfellow, plunged into the first dark entry which presented itself.  Hurriedly, and with a frowning face, he cut off his left sleeve from shoulder to wrist; and this act, by disclosing his linen, put him in possession of the white sleeve which he had once involuntarily donned, and once discarded.  The white cross on the cap he could not assume, for he was bareheaded.  But he had little doubt that the sleeve would suffice, and with a bold demeanour he made his way northward until he reached again the Rue Ferronerie.

Excited groups were wandering up and down the street, and, fearing to traverse its crowded narrows, he went by lanes parallel with it as far as the Rue St. Denis, which he crossed.  Everywhere he saw houses gutted and doors burst in, and traces of a cruelty and a fanaticism almost incredible.  Near the Rue des Lombards he saw a dead child, stripped stark and hanged on the hook of a cobbler’s shutter.  A little farther on in the same street he stepped over the body of a handsome young woman, distinguished by the length and beauty of her hair.  To obtain her bracelets, her captors had cut off her hands; afterwards—­but God knows how long afterwards—­a passer-by, more pitiful than his fellows, had put her out of her misery with a spit, which still remained plunged in her body.

M. de Tignonville shuddered at the sight, and at others like it.  He loathed the symbol he wore, and himself for wearing it; and more than once his better nature bade him return and play the nobler part.  Once he did turn with that intention.  But he had set his mind on comfort and pleasure, and the value of these things is raised, not lowered, by danger and uncertainty.  Quickly his stoicism oozed away; he turned again.  Barely avoiding the rush of a crowd of wretches who were bearing a swooning victim to the river, he hurried through the Rue des Lombards, and reached in safety the house beside the Golden Maid.

He had no doubt now on which side of the Maid Madame St. Lo lived; the house was plain before him.  He had only to knock.  But in proportion as he approached his haven, his anxiety grew.  To lose all, with all in his grasp, to fail upon the threshold, was a thing which bore no looking at; and it was with a nervous hand and eyes cast fearfully behind him that he plied the heavy iron knocker which adorned the door.

He could not turn his gaze from a knot of ruffians, who were gathered under one of the tottering gables on the farther side of the street.  They seemed to be watching him, and he fancied—­though the distance rendered this impossible—­that he could see suspicion growing in their eyes.  At any moment they might cross the roadway, they might approach, they might challenge him.  And at the thought he knocked and knocked again.  Why did not the porter come?

Ay, why?  For now a score of contingencies came into the young man’s mind and tortured him.  Had Madame St. Lo withdrawn to safer quarters and closed the house?  Or, good Catholic as she was, had she given way to panic, and determined to open to no one?  Or was she ill?  Or had she perished in the general disorder?  Or—­