“Hush!” he quavered, breathing hard so that his words whistled between his toothless gums, “you do not know my wife.  I tell you, she is the familiar of the marshal himself.”

“Then,” cried James Douglas, slapping his thigh, “she is young and pretty, of a surety.  I know what these soldiers are familiar with.  I would that she would come home and partake with us now.”

“Nay,” said the old man, without taking offence, “you mistake, kind sir, I meant familiar in witchcraft, in devilry—­not (as it were) in levity and cozenage.”

The fragrant stew was now ready to be dished in great platters of wood, and the guests fell to keenly, each being provided with a wooden spoon.  The meat they cut with their daggers, but the most part was, however, tender enough to come apart in their fingers, which, as all know, better preserves the savour.

At first the cripple denied having any wine, but another gold angel from the Lord James induced him to draw a leathern bottle from some secret hoard, and decant it into a pitcher for them.  It was resinous and Spanish, but, as Malise said, “It made warm the way it went down.”  And after all with wine that is always the principal thing.

As the feast proceeded old Caesar Martin told the three Scots why the long street of the village had been cleared of children so quickly at the first sound of their horses’ feet.

“And in truth if you had not come across the moor, but along the beaten track from the Chateau of Machecoul, you would never have caught so much as a glimpse of any child or mother in all Saint Philbert.”

At this point he beckoned Sholto, Malise, and the Lord James to come nearer to him, and standing with his back to the fire and their three heads very close, he related the terrible tale of the Dread that for eight years had stalked grim and gaunt through the westlands of France, La Vendee, and Bas Bretagne.  In all La Vendee there was not a village that had not lost a child.  In many a hamlet about the shores of the sunny Loire was there scarce a house from which one had not vanished.  They were seen playing in the greenwood, the eye was lifted, and lo! they were not.  A boy went to the well.  An hour after his pitcher stood beside it filled to the brim.  But he himself was never more seen by holt or heath.  A little maid, sweet and innocent, looked over the churchyard wall; she spied something that pleased her.  She climbed over to get it—­and was not.

“Oh, I could tell you of a thousand such if I had time,” shrilled the thin treble of the cripple in their eager ears, “if I dared—­if I only dared!”

“Dared,” said Malise; “why man—­what is the matter with you?  None could hear you but we three men.”

“My wife—­my wife,” he quavered; “I bid you be silent, or at least speak not so loud.  La Meffraye she is called—­she can hear all things.  See—­”

He made a sudden movement and bared his right arm.  It was withered to the shoulder and of a dark purple colour approaching black.