"We are saved!" said Fergan when he had slaked his thirst and felt his strength returning. "By husbanding the water still left in this pouch, we shall have enough to reach Marhala with. I have a provision of dates in my knap-sack. The ass will serve you and the child to ride on, my poor Joan. I can still walk. As to the seigneur of Plouernel," Fergan proceeded with a somber look, "he will soon need neither provision nor conveyance!" And rising to his feet, while his wife and child followed his movements with uneasy eyes, the serf approached Neroweg. The seigneur, still stretched upon the sand, writhed in his bands, tugging to burst them; then, exhausted by his idle efforts, he lay motionless. "Do you recognize me?" asked the serf, crossing his arms on his breast, and looking down upon the fettered seigneur of Plouernel; "Do you recognize me? In Gaul you were my seigneur, I your serf. I am the grandson of Den-Brao the Mason, whom your grandfather, Neroweg IV, killed of hunger in the subterranean donjon of Plouernel. I am a relative of Bezenecq the Rich, who died under the torture, in the presence of his own daughter, herself going crazy with fear, and dying at the very moment when I was rescuing her from her cell. I had to dig her grave among the rocks that lie about the issue of the secret passage from your castle."
"By the tomb of the Saviour! Is it you, vagabond, who penetrated to the turret of Azenor the Pale? You helped her in her flight?"
"I went to look in your den for my child, whom you see yonder."
"Woe is me! I am alone in this desert, without arms, bound hand and foot, at the mercy of this vile serf. How comes this dog to have survived this long journey? A curse upon him!"
"I have survived in order to avenge upon you the wrongs you have perpetrated upon my kin. This is not the first time that a descendant of Joel the Gaul locks horns with a descendant of Neroweg the Frank. Before us, in the course of centuries that rolled by, the ancestors of us two have met arms in hand. Fate so wills it. It is a war to death between our two races. The struggle, mayhap, will continue yet ages to come. Neroweg, I am the evil genius of your race, as you and yours are the persecutors of mine."