[The House of the Wolf by Stanley Weyman]@TWC D-Link book
The House of the Wolf

CHAPTER IX
18/36

For once Croisette had fallen into his rightful place.
My flight from the gate, the vain attempt to close the house, the barricade before the inner door--these were all designed to draw the assailants to one spot.

Pavannes and his wife--the latter hastily disguised as a boy--had hidden behind the door of the hutch by the gates--the porter's hutch, and had slipped out and fled in the first confusion of the attack.
Even the servants, as we learned afterwards, who had hidden themselves in the lower parts of the house got away in the same manner, though some of them--they were but few in all were stopped as Huguenots and killed before the day ended.

I had the more reason to hope that Pavannes and his wife would get clear off, inasmuch as I had given the Duke's ring to him, thinking it might serve him in a strait, and believing that we should have little to fear ourselves once clear of his house; unless we should meet the Vidame indeed.
We did not meet him as it turned out; but before we had traversed a quarter of the distance we had to go we found that fears based on reason were not the only terrors we had to resist.

Pavannes' house, where we had hitherto been, stood at some distance from the centre of the blood-storm which was enwrapping unhappy Paris that morning.

It was several hundred paces from the Rue de Bethisy where the Admiral lived, and what with this comparative remoteness and the excitement of our own little drama, we had not attended much to the fury of the bells, the shots and cries and uproar which proclaimed the state of the city.


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