"And if you leave so much as a knife upon them I will throw you off the tower.

You understand, do you?
Then in, and strip them!" And driven by sheer torture--for the pike had thrice drawn blood from his writhing body--Louis crept, weeping and quaking, into the staircase; and on one of her tormentors Anne was avenged.

But Claude was thinking more of her present peril than of this; he had moved from the stairhead.
A swell in the volume of sound which rose from the Corraterie had drawn him to that side of the tower, where shaking off the exhaustion which for a time had overcome him, he was straining his eyes to learn what was passing in the babel below.
The sight was a singular one.

The Monnaye Gate far to the left, the Tertasse immediately before him, and the Treille on his right, were the centres of separate conflagrations.

In one place a house, fired by the petard employed to force the door, was actually alight.