“What have I always said?  Beware of wimple folks.  They are the deep ones.  Their naivete is nothing but a disguise.  Here we have a case in point.  This boy, from all accounts, is the pure type of the callous murderer.  He stutters.  He makes uncalled-for gurglings of a bestial nature.  He has pendulous ears, and certain other stigmata of degeneration which are familiar to all conversant with criminal anthropology.  Of course he denies everything.  But mark my words!  After six or seven months, when the prison diet begins to take effect, he will confess.  I know the species; it is all too common.  Meanwhile we must congratulate ourselves on having tracked down the culprit so soon.”

To condemn for homicide the cousin of a Catholic priest warmed the cockles of his free-thinking heart.  In fact, on second thoughts, it was better than if he had caught the real murderer who might have turned out to be an atheist, which would have been bad enough—­or possibly a freemason, which would have been really awkward.  The news spread rapidly over the island, and caused wild rejoicings among the anti-clericals.

The rejoicings were of brief duration.

Torquemada, as usual, was in fighting trim.  Like all God-fearing ascetics, he was a man-eater at heart.  He made up his mind long ago to eat the judge, whom he considered an offence to Heaven and earth—­the official mouthpiece of the devil.  Up to the present he had bided his time, waiting for a good opportunity.  The time was now ripe.

Not that he greatly loved his cousin.  The family to which the unhappy youth belonged was of no credit or use to himself, and this particular member was worse than useless, being afflicted with an unpardonable vice—­lack of judgment.  His stupidity had already got him into a number of minor scrapes.  As a child he annoyed foreigners by ingenuous requests for money, stole flowers from neighbours’ gardens because they were so irresistibly pretty, tied saucepans to their cats because they had such irresistibly long tails and made such irresistibly droll movements and noises in order to get rid of them, frightened old ladies by making faces at them; sometimes, by way of a change, he threw off a fit; later on, he had taken to smashing crockery, mooning about the vineyards, forgetting errands entrusted to him, throwing stones at passing carriages and making a general nuisance of himself.  The parroco knew that he had been dismissed as incompetent by tradespeople to whom he was apprenticed, by farmers who had employed him as a labourer.  He could not even repeat his Ave Maria without producing sinister crepitations from his gullet.  And now he had crowned all by this surpassing act of imprudence.  If he had only kept his mouth shut, like everybody else.  But there!  What could you expect from a fool?