les in a choked voice, and
he fell backward.

The next morning the people were beforehand with the executioner, loudly
demanding their prey. All the national troops and mercenaries that the
judicial authorities could command were echelonned in the streets,
opposing a sort of dam to the torrent of the raging crowd. The sudden
insatiable cruelty that too often degrades human nature had awaked in the
populace: all heads were turned with hatred and frenzy; all imaginations
inflamed with the passion for revenge; groups of men and women, roaring
like wild beasts, threatened to knock down the walls of the prison, if
the condemned were not handed over to them to take to the place of
punishment: a great murmur arose, continuous, ever the same, like the
growling of thunder: the queen's heart was petrified with terror.

But, in spite of the desire of Bertram de Baux to satisfy the popular
wish, the preparations for the solemn execution were not completed till
midday, when the sun's rays fell scorchingly upon the town. There went up
a mighty cry from ten thousand palpitating breasts when a report first
ran through the crowd that the prisoners were about to appear. There was
a moment of silence, and the prison doors rolled slowly back on their
hinges with a rusty, grating noise. A triple row of horsemen, with
lowered visor and lance in rest, started the procession, and amid yells
and curses the condemned prisoners came out one by one, each tied upon a
cart, gagged and naked to the waist, in charge of two executioners, whose
orders were to torture them the whole length of their way. On the first
cart was the former laundress of Catana, afterwards wife of the grand
seneschal and governess to the queen, Philippa of Cabane: the two
executioners at right and left of her scourged her with such fury that
the blood spurting up from the wounds left a long track in all the
streets passed by the cortege.

Immediately following their mother on separate carts came the Countesses
of Terlizzi and Morcone, the elder no more than eighteen years of age.
The two sisters were so marvellously beautiful that in the crowd a murmur
of surprise was heard, and greedy eyes were fixed upon their naked
trembling shoulders. But the men charged to torture them gazed with
ferocious smiles upon their forms of seductive beauty, and, armed with
sharp knives, cut off pieces of their flesh with a deliberate enjoyment
and threw them out to the crowd, who eagerly