"Down with him!"
He saw a desperate woman attempting to force her way through the crowd, and recognized in her his mother. He threw a glance at his slain beloved, and then an idea suddenly flashed through his brain.
"Hither, Valentine, hither!" It was the voice of Simplex.
Valentine sprang down from the scaffold among the crowd.
"After him, seize him!" cried the members of the town council to the drabants surrounding the scaffold.
The throng was very dense. Each man pressed hard upon his neighbor. But when Valentine broke through, a path was made for him which closed immediately on his pursuers. Not one of the crowd laid hands on him. Simplex and his comrades covered his flight.
He escaped from the crowd, and ran along the street with his pursuers hot upon his heels, headed by the superrector with his gold-headed stick of office raised aloft, the headsman (who had in the meantime recovered) with his drawn sword, and the drabants with their halberts.
At the end of the street Valentine found an open door, through which he darted. This door closed behind him, and when the pursuers came up and loudly demanded admission, it suddenly reopened and out stepped the Prior of the Jesuits, Father Hieronymus, with the charter in his hand. They could tell it by the long pendant seals.
"Be off!" cried he, "this house is an asylum!"
It was the cloister of the Jesuits. The secular authorities were debarred from crossing the threshold by their own charter.