The clock was striking ten, the furious creature’s dinner hour; he went away with the executioner and the clerk, leaving Katheline alone before the fire, in the torture chamber.
At eleven they came back and found Katheline seated stiff and motionless. The clerk said:
“She is dead, I think.”
The sheriff ordered the executioner to take Katheline down from the coffin and the shoes from off her feet. Not being able to pull them off, he cut them away, and the feet of Katheline were disclosed red and bleeding.
And the sheriff, thinking of his meal, looked at her without a word; but presently she recovered her senses, and falling on the ground and unable to rise for all her efforts, she said to the sheriff:
“Once on a time wouldst fain have had me to wife, but now thou shalt not have me. Four times three it is the sacred number, and the thirteenth is the husband.”
Then as the sheriff would have spoken, she said to him:
“Stay silent, he has hearing finer than the archangel that in heaven counts the heart beats of the just. Why dost thou come so late? Four times three it is the sacred number, he slayeth those that desire me.”
The sheriff said:
“She receives the devil in her bed.”