“No!  For if I die you lose her!” Tignonville replied in a voice of triumph.  “Ha, ha!  I touch you there!” he continued.  “You dare not, for my safety is part of the price, and is more to you than it is to myself!  You may threaten, M. de Tavannes, you may bluster, and shout and point to the window”—­and he mocked, with a disdainful mimicry, the other’s gesture—­“but my safety is more to you than to me!  And ’twill end there!”

“You believe that?”

“I know it!”

In two strides Count Hannibal was at the window.  He seized a great piece of the boarding which closed one-half of the opening; he wrenched it away.  A flood of evening light burst in through the aperture, and fell on and heightened the flushed passion of his features, as he turned again to his opponent.

“Then if you know it,” he cried vehemently, “in God’s name act upon it!” And he pointed to the window.

“Act upon it?”

“Ay, act upon it!” Tavannes repeated, with a glance of flame.  “The road is open!  If you would save your mistress, behold the way!  If you would save her from the embrace she abhors, from the eyes under which she trembles, from the hand of a master, there lies the way!  And it is not her glove only you will save, but herself, her soul, her body!  So,” he continued, with a certain wildness, and in a tone wherein contempt and bitterness were mingled, “to the lions, brave lover!  Will you your life for her honour?  Will you death that she may live a maid?  Will you your head to save her finger?  Then, leap down! leap down!  The lists are open, the sand is strewed!  Out of your own mouth I have it that if you perish she is saved!  Then out, Monsieur!  Cry ‘I am a Huguenot!’ And God’s will be done!”

Tignonville was livid.  “Rather, your will!” he panted.  “Your will, you devil!  Nevertheless—­”

“You will go!  Ha! ha!  You will go!”

For an instant it seemed that he would go.  Stung by the challenge, wrought on by the contempt in which Tavannes held him, he shot a look of hate at the tempter; he caught his breath, and laid his hand on the edge of the shuttering as if he would leap out.

But it goes hard with him who has once turned back from the foe.  The evening light, glancing cold on the burnished pike-points of a group of archers who stood near, caught his eye and went chill to his heart.  Death, not in the arena, not in the sight of shouting thousands, but in this darkening street, with an enemy laughing from the window, death with no revenge to follow, with no certainty that after all she would be safe, such a death could be compassed only by pure love—­the love of a child for a parent, of a parent for a child, of a man for the one woman in the world!

He recoiled.  “You would not spare her!” he cried, his face damp with sweat—­for he knew now that he would not go.  “You want to be rid of me!  You would fool me, and then—­”