"Alas, Sir champion!" answered Alison, "I have not yet told you the end of the adventure. While Mazurec was being taken to prison, the bailiff went for Aveline at the vicarage and brought her to the castle. She resisted her seigneur with all her strength. He then laughed in her face and said: 'Ho! you resist me! Very well. I shall now have the pleasure of exercising my right by judicial decree. It will be a good lesson to Jacques Bonhomme.' He thereupon had the bride taken to a cell, and lodged a complaint against her in the court of the seneschal at Beauvais. Seeing that the law recognizes the right of a seigneur over his female vassals, the court gave its decree accordingly. It is in the name of justice that the wretched Aveline was violated last night by our seigneur; it is in the name of justice that Mazurec is sentenced to beg the pardon of his seigneur for having intended to oppose him in the exercise of his seigniorial right; it is in the name of justice that, after this public expiation, Mazurec is to fight the thief of a knight." "Aye," put in William Caillet, clenching his fists; "Mazurec is to fight on foot and armed with a stick against his robber, covered with iron ... Mazurec will be vanquished and killed, or, if he survive, will be drowned. I shall try to fish out his body and bury him in some hole ... Then I shall take away my daughter ... She is to be returned to me this morning, and who knows but in nine months I may be the grandfather of a noble brat!" After a short pause the peasant resumed with a sinister and chilling smile: "Oh! If that child should live ... if it should live...." But he did not finish his sentence. For a moment he remained silent; then, laying his horny right hand upon the shoulder of Jocelyn, he approached the young man's ear and added in a low voice: "Shortly ago you said an end must be put to these horrors, they call for blood!" "Yes, and I say so again. These horrors cry for vengeance! They cry for the death and destruction of our oppressors!" "He who says that aloud is a man who will act," replied the serf fastening his small, savage and piercing eyes upon the champion. "If the time for action arrives, remember William Caillet ... of the village of Cramoisy, near Clermont." "I shall not forget your name," Jocelyn returned in a low voice to Caillet, and clasped his hand. "The hour of justice and vengeance may sound sooner than you think, especially if there are many serfs like you!" "There are," rejoined the peasant in the same low voice. "Jacques Bonhomme is on his feet. We are preparing a general uprising." "It was to assure myself regarding that that I rode into this region," whispered Jocelyn in the ear of Caillet, without being heard by Alison. "Silence and courage! The day of reprisal is at hand."