The process consumed no great while. Ugo was presently riding up the town’s chief street, a thoroughfare that marked the ridge pole of the hill of Roche-de-Frêne. People were abroad, and as he passed they did him reverence. He was a great churchman, who could hurt or help them, soul and body, here and hereafter! But at a quieter corner, before a pile of old, dark buildings, he came upon, and that so closely that his mantle almost brushed them, a man and two women, poorly dressed, who stood without movement or appeal for blessing. Had they been viewed at a distance, noted merely for three stony units in a bending crowd, the bishop had been too superb to notice, but here they were under his nose, unreverent, stocks before his eyes, their own eyes gazing as though he were not! Ugo checked his mule, spoke sharply. “Why, shameless ones, do you not bend to Holy Church, her councillors and seneschals?” The man spoke. “We bend to God.” “To God within,” said one of the women. “Not to ill within—not to luxury, pomp, and tyranny!” “Woe!” cried the other woman, the younger. “Woe when the hearth no longer warms, but destroys!” “_Bougres_,” spoke the secretary at his master’s ear. “Paulicians, Catharists, _Bons hommes_, Perfecti, Manichees.” “That is to say, heretics,” said Ugo. “They grow hideously bold, having Satan for saviour and surety! Take order for these. Lodge complaint against them. See them laid fast in prison.” The younger woman looked at him earnestly. “Ah, ah!” she said. “Thou poor prisoner! Let me whisper thee—there is a way out of thy dark hold! If only the door is not too high and wide and fully open for thine eyes to see it!” “They are not of Roche-de-Frêne,” spoke the secretary. “I warrant them from Toulouse or Albi!” “I, and more than I, have eyes upon Count Raymond of Toulouse,” said the bishop. “Two or three of you take these wretches to the right officer. And do thou, Nicholas, appear against them to-morrow.” He touched his mule with his riding switch and rode on, a dark-browed man, with a thin cheek and thin, close-shutting lips. He was a martial bishop; he had fought in Sicily and at Damascus and Edessa, and at Constantinople.