“No.”
She slipped her legs out of bed and sat on the edge of it, thrusting her feet into her slippers. She wanted to do something at once which would take her thoughts from that piercing and inhuman din. Paul brought to her the medicine-chest and she dressed and bandaged the half-healed wound.
“Thank you, Marguerite. I’ll tell them to get your bath ready,” he said, as he turned to go. But the screaming overhead made her blood run cold. She could endure the roar of the seventy-fives, the rattle of musketry, even the wild yelling of the men; but this cruel frenzy of the gaily-dressed women upon the house-tops, never tiring whilst daylight lasted, shocked her as something obscene, the screaming of offal-birds, not women, a thing not so much unnatural as an accusation against nature and the God that made nature. She quickly called her lover back.
“Paul, you took my little pistol from the drawer of my table there last night.”
“Well?” said Paul, looking at her in doubt.
“I want you to give it back to me.”
Paul Ravenel hesitated.
“You need not fear,” she continued. “Yesterday I meant to use it—for your dear sake as I thought—or rather for both our sakes. But since you will keep me with you—why, all that’s over and I shall not use it unless there is real need. Listen!”
She lifted her hand and, as she listened, shuddered. “You spoke of those women this morning. What they would do to me. I should feel—safe if you would give my pistol back to me.”
Paul took it from his belt and laid it on the flat of her hand.