"No, Ronan, I am no craven. No—were she my daughter I would kill her."
"I understand. Odille is a stranger to you—you cannot love her enough to decide to kill her. We must pardon the bishopess for her want of kindness, not so, Loysik?"
At that moment the young slave moved, gave a slight sigh, half raised her head, her eyes opened and looked around for Ronan. When they finally fell upon him she said, after a moment, in a weak voice:
"Ronan, is the night over, and is it now day?"
"This is not the light of day my child; it is the light from the lamp that burns outside our prison. Your strength seems exhausted, you were in a torpor."
"I dreamed a sweet and sad dream. My mother rocked me on her knees singing the chant of Hena, and then she said to me weeping: 'Odille, it is you they are going to burn!' I then woke up and believed it was day. Oh, Ronan, it is a long time till to-morrow! And the execution! The execution! How it will be prolonged—unless the pain be so intense that I die immediately."
"And will you not regret life?"
"Ronan, I tried to kill myself when I thought you were dead; you are sentenced to death like ourselves; I have neither father nor mother; what should I regret, all the less seeing that we are to live again in yonder worlds near those whom we have loved? We shall soon meet again."
"By the faith of a Vagre, what is death, beautiful bishopess? Only a change of vestments and lodging. As to the execution, two or three hours of suffering is the extreme, and the end is certain. Do you know, Loysik, what grieves me most at this hour? It is to quit this world, leaving our dearly beloved Gaul forever in the clutches of the Franks and bishops!"
"No, no, brother—centuries are centuries to man, they are hardly hours to mankind in its eternal progress! The world in which we live seems large to us—and yet, what is it, rolling and confounded among the myriads of the starry worlds who at this hour of the night glisten in our eyes from the vast expanse of the vault of heaven—mysterious worlds in which we are to relive successively, in body and soul, but with bodies new and evermore repurified! Brother, at the time of the conquest of Caesar, our ancestors, then enslaved and loaded with chains centuries ago in the very ergastula where we now are, said, perhaps, as you just now in despair: 'Our dearly beloved Gaul is forever enslaved to the Roman conqueror'—and yet not two centuries and a half had passed before, by dint of heroic insurrections against the Romans, Gaul again won back, step by step, although paying dearly for it with the blood of our fathers, the country's rights, liberties, and even final independence during the glorious era of Victoria the Great!"