The men, ashamed to desert their companion, who was related to one of them, yielded to her entreaties and remained, hoping that the storm would be a sufficient excuse for the delay.  As soon as it was light, the five resumed their journey.  But the news of their crime had reached the ears of Laplace before they got back.  They were arrested, and all their excuses were of no avail.  Laplace ordered the men to be taken outside the town and shot.  The young girl was condemned to be hanged; and the sentence was to be carried out that very day, but some nuns who had been sent for to prepare her for death, having vainly begged Laplace to show mercy, entreated the girl to declare that she would soon become a mother.  She indignantly refused to save her life at the cost of her good name, so the nuns took the lie on themselves and made the necessary declaration before the captain, begging him if he had no pity for the mother to spare the child at least, by granting a reprieve till it should be born.  The captain was not for a moment deceived, but he sent for a midwife and ordered her to examine the young girl.  At the end of half an hour she declared that the assertion of the nuns was true.

“Very well,” said the captain:  “let them both be kept in prison for three months; if by the end of that time the truth of this assertion is not self-evident, both shall be hanged.”  When this decision was made known to the poor woman, she was overcome by fear, and asked to see the, captain again, to whom she confessed that, led away by the entreaties of the nuns, she had told a lie.

Upon this, the woman was sentenced to be publicly whipped, and the young girl hanged on a gibbet round which were placed the corpses of the four men of whose death she was the cause.

As may easily be supposed, the “Cadets of the Cross” vied with both Catholics and Protestants in the work of destruction.  One of their bands devoted itself to destroying everything belonging to the new converts from Beaucaire to Nimes.  They killed a woman and two children at Campuget, an old man of eighty at a farm near Bouillargues, several persons at Cicure, a young girl at Caissargues, a gardener at Nimes, and many other persons, besides carrying off all the flocks, furniture, and other property they could lay hands on, and burning down the farmhouses of Clairan, Loubes, Marine, Carlot, Campoget Miraman, La Bergerie, and Larnac—­all near St. Gilies and Manduel.  “They stopped travellers on the highways,” says Louvreloeil, “and by way of finding out whether they were Catholic or not, made them say in Latin the Lord’s Prayer, the Ave Maria, the Symbol of the Faith, and the General Confession, and those who were unable to do this were put to the sword.  In Dions nine corpses were found supposed to have been killed by their hands, and when the body of a shepherd who had been in the service of the Sieur de Roussiere, a former minister, was found hanging to a tree, no one doubted who were