But I have done some little too!" "Ay! But cannot we----" "What would you have us do more ?" the man continued, and with reason.
"Leave the roof to them?
'Tis all they want! Leave them to raise the old iron grate, and let in--what I hear yonder ?" He indicated the darker outer plain below the wall, whence rose the murmur of halted battalions, waiting baffled, and uncertain, the opening of the gate.
"Ay, but if we descend ?" "May we not win the gate from a score ?" Marcadel answered, between contempt and admiration.

"Is that what you mean?
And when we have won it, hold it?
No, not if each of us were Gaston of Foix, Bayard, and M.
de Crillon rolled into one! But what is this?
We are winning or we are losing! Which is it ?" From the Treille Gate had burst a rabble of men; a struggling crowd illumined by the glare of three or four lights.

Pikes and halberds flashed in the heart of the mob as it swirled and struggled down the Corraterie in the direction of the gate from which the two men viewed it.

Half-way thither, in the open, its progress seemed to be checked; it hung and paused, swaying this way and that; it recoiled.

But at length, with a roar of triumph, it rolled on anew over half a dozen prostrate forms, and in a trice burst about the base of the Porte Neuve, swept, as it seemed to those above, into the gateway, and--in a twinkling broke back, repelled by a crashing volley that shook the tower.
"They are our people!" cried Claude.
"Ay!" "And now is our time!" The lad waved his weapon.