Immediately relapsing into his former close-mouthedness, the peasant made no answer. The procession just turned into the street. The coffin of John Baillet, heavily inlaid with gold and preceded by royal heralds and sergeants-at-arms was borne by twelve menials of the Regent in costly livery. The young prince and his brothers, accompanied by the seigneurs of the court, alone followed the coffin. Charles, the Duke of Normandy and now Regent of the French, as the eldest son of King John, at the time an English prisoner, had, like his brothers and the French nobility, fled ignominiously from the battlefield of Poitiers. The young man who now governed Gaul was barely twenty years of age. He was of frail physique and pale complexion. His sickly face concealed under a kind and timid mien a large fund of obstinacy, of perfidy, of wile and of wickedness--odious vices usually rare in youths, except of royal lineage. Magnificently dressed in gold-embroidered green velvet, a black head-gear ornamented with a chain and brooch of costly stones on his head, the mean-spirited and languishing Regent marched slowly leaning on a cane. At a short distance behind him advanced his brothers, and then came the seigneurs of the court, among them the marshal of Normandy, who, ordered by the young prince, had superintended the mutilation and subsequent execution of Perrin Macé. The marshal, who was the Sire of Conflans, one of the Regent's favorites, superb and arrogant, cast upon the few and straggling spectators disdainful and threatening looks, and exchanged a few words with the Sire of Charny, a courtier no less loved by the prince than he was detested by the people. Suddenly Rufin the Tankard-smasher felt his arm rudely seized by the vigorous hand of Caillet, who with distended and flaming eyes, and his breast heaving with pain, gasped out: "Look!... There they are!... There are the two! The Sire of Nointel and that other, the knight of Chaumontel!... Oh, do you see them both with their scarlet hats, down there with the tall man in an ermine cloak?" cried out Caillet despite himself. "Yes, yes; I see the two seigneurs," answered the student, astonished at the emotion manifested by the peasant. "But what makes you tremble so?" "Down in the country they are thought dead or prisoners of the English," exclaimed Caillet. "Fortunately it is not so.... There they are ... there they are ... I have seen them with my own eyes!" and contracting his lips with a frightful smile the serf added raising his two fists to heaven: "Oh, Mazurec!... Oh, my daughter!... Here I see the two men at last!... They will return home for the marriage of the handsome Gloriande.... We've got them!... We've got them!" "The looks of this man make me shiver," thought the student to himself, gazing at the peasant with stupor, and he proceeded aloud: "Who are those two seigneurs that you are speaking of?"