"Gwennola!—Gwennola!" moaned Yvon; "my father’s darling,—his little Gwennola! Is it possible that thou hast so fallen—art become so lost? Diane," he cried, turning almost fiercely upon her, "I accept thy word. Prove to me my sister’s guilt, and I will myself light the faggots which shall purify the honour of the house of Mereac. Yet I warn thee that if this tale be false, the very love I bear thee shall shrivel and burn away till nothing be left but the ashes of hatred." "I will prove it," said Diane, returning his look unflinchingly. "This very night, with thine own eyes shalt thou behold thy sister clasped to the arms of one of hell’s foulest shades, and with him plotting for thy destruction." *CHAPTER XVIII* It is difficult to realize how tremendous a hold the superstition of witchcraft had upon the minds of our ancestors from the earliest ages. And in the fifteenth century the fear of wizards and witches and belief in their supernatural powers was almost unlimited. Indeed, the repute of madness was not more fatal to dogs than that of witchcraft to human beings.[#] So destructive was it, that there is scarcely a hamlet of ancient date west of the Carpathians wherein crowds of witches have not been massacred during the middle ages. For a considerable period Cologne burnt four hundred of these wretches, Paris three hundred, and a multitude of second-rate towns two hundred a-piece every year. To be stigmatised as a witch was to be condemned, sooner or later, to the stake; and so well was this understood, that the malicious had only to fix that evil name on their victims in order to secure their execution. A list remains of some hundred and fifty witches slain in three years by that insignificant place, Wurzburg; and among the sufferers we find half-a-dozen vagrants, children, and others; a scold, a learned judge, a skilful linguist, several popular preachers, and "Goebel Babelin, the prettiest girl in Wurzburg." [#] See _Witches and their Craft_. It was a fundamental axiom of the witch-codes, as explained by Bodin, that no witch might be acquitted unless her innocence shone "as clear as the noontide sun"; and every care was taken to render that impossible. But by far the most powerful means of effecting their conviction—surpassing false witness and torture by an infinite length—was the infamous scrutiny to which the miserable creatures were subjected. The search for devil mark and amulet, as prescribed by the Church, was regarded as worse than death itself, and of the thousands who perished, a vast proportion died self-accused, preferring the deadly search of the flame to that of the monkish inquisitors.