"What spectacle is that to be, my friends?"
"The four people who were sentenced to-day will be executed—Ronan the Vagre, the hermit-laborer, a renegade monk who joined the Vagrery; a little female slave, their accomplice; and the bishopess, an accursed witch; they say she once was the wife of our blessed bishop Cautin."
"Oh, have they been capturing Vagres in this region, my friends? And so they were all sentenced to-day?"
"The mahl assembled at noon. The King's son and our holy bishop were present. Ronan the Vagre and the hermit-laborer were first put to the torture."
"Then they must have denied that they had run the Vagrery, did they?"
"No. Ronan, the accursed bandit, on the contrary, boasted that he was a Vagre."
"Why, then, the torture?"
"That is just what the son of the King said. He thought that the torture had no purpose with Ronan. He opposed it strongly."
"But our holy bishop," explained the other slave, "declared that a truth extracted by torture was doubly certain, it being in the nature of a judgment of God. Thereupon no one raised any further objection, and matters took their course."
"At the bishop's orders," resumed the first slave, "the feet of the Vagre and of the hermit-laborer were dipped into boiling oil—they confessed a second time."