y sufficient.

CHAPTER XXXII.

IN THEIR CLUTCHES

It was the night of the grand _coup_ which was to ease Master Raphael
Llorient of all his troubles financial, and also to put an acknowledged
heretic within the clutches of these two faithful servants of the Holy
Office, Dom Ambrose Teruel and his second, Frey Tullio the Neapolitan.

The affair had been carried out with the utmost zeal, and though at
first success had seemed more than doubtful, the familiars of the Office
had pounced upon their victim walking calmly towards them down a little
hollow among the sand-dunes.

At La Masane, it appeared to them that an alarm had been given, and
that, as little Andres the ape expressed it, "the whole byre had broken
halter and run for it."

The familiars were hard on the track, however, and the way from La
Masane to the beach is no child's playground when the nights are dark as
the inside of a wolf. Serra, Calbet, and Andres Font were three sturdy
rascals, condemned to long terms of imprisonment, who had obtained
freedom from their penalties on condition of faithfully serving the Holy
Inquisition. They were all nearly, though vaguely, related to prominent
ecclesiastics, the warmth of whose family feelings had obtained this
favour for them.

They had, therefore, every reason for satisfying their masters. For
pardon frequently followed zeal, and the ex-culprit and ex-familiar was
permitted to return in the halo of a terrible sanctity to his native
village. There were not a few, however, whom the craft ended by
fascinating. And after in vain trying the cultivation of crops and the
pruning of vines, lo! they would be back again at the door of the Holy
Office, begging to be taken in, if it were only to be hewers of wood and
drawers of water for the _auto de fe_ and the water-torture.

Of the present three, Serra, a Murcian from these half-depopulated
villages where the Moors once dwelt, alone was of this type. A huge man
with a low forehead, a great shapeless face like a clenched fist, with
little twinkling pigs' eyes set deep under hairless brows, he did his
work for the love of it. He it was who saw to it that no harm befel the
prisoner on the long night-ride to Perpignan. It was a dainty capture,
well carried out. Since the wholesale emigration of the Jews of
Roussillon to Bayonne in the West, the _auto de fe_ of the East was
usually shamed for want of pretty young maids. These always attracted
the crowd more th