Far below him, on the narrow, black triangle of the Corraterie, lay the Savoyards, some three hundred in number, who had scaled the wall.

Out of the darkness of the plain, beyond and below them, rose the faint, distant quacking of alarmed ducks, proving that others of the enemy moved there.

Even as he listened, the whirr of a wild goose winging its flight over the city came to his ear.

On his left, with a dim oil lamp marking, here or there, the meeting of four ways, the town slept unsuspicious, recking nothing of the fate prepared for it.
It was a solemn moment, and Claude on the roof under the night sky, felt it to be so.

Restored to his higher self, he breathed a prayer for guidance and for her, and was as eager now as he had before been cold.
But not the less for that did he ply the wits that, working freely in this hour of peril, proved him one of those whom battle owns for master.
He had gathered enough, lying on his face in the bastion, to feel sure that the forlorn hope which had gained a footing on the wall would not move until the arrival of the main body whom it was its plan to admit by the Porte Neuve.