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.