"Nele is bad. Why hast thou gone so quickly, Hanske, my darling?"
"Where wast thou, ill mother," said Soetkin, "while they would have taken away thy child's honour?"
"Nele is bad," said Katheline. "I was with my black lord, when the gray devil came to us, his face all bloody, and said: 'Come away, lad: the house is a bad house; the men in it would beat us to the death, and the women have knives at their fingertips.' Then they ran to their horses and disappeared in the mist. Nele is bad!"
On the morrow, while they were drinking hot milk, Soetkin said to Katheline:
"Thou seest that sorrow is driving me already out of this world, wouldst thou drive me to flee from it through thy damned witchcrafts?"
"Nele is bad. Come back, Hanske, my darling."
On the next Wednesday the devils came back together. Since the Saturday Nele slept at the house of the widow Van den Houte, saying that she could not stay at Katheline's by reason of the presence of Ulenspiegel, a young bachelor.
Katheline received her black lord and his friend in the keet, which is the wash house and the bakery appurtenant to the main dwelling. And then they held feast and revel with old wines and smoked ox tongues, that were always there awaiting them. The black devil said to Katheline:
"We have need," said he, "for an important task that is to be done, of a heavy sum of money; give us what thou canst."
Katheline, being unwilling to give more than a florin, they threatened to kill her. But they let her off with two gold carolus and seven deniers.
"Come no more on the Saturday," she told them. "Ulenspiegel knows that day and will await you with weapons to kill you, and I should die after you."
On that day Ulenspiegel and Nele slept without fear of the devils, for they believed that they came only on Saturday.
Katheline rose and went into the keet, to see if her friends had come.
She was sorely impatient, because since she had seen Hanske again, her madness had greatly lessened, for folk said it was love-madness.
Not seeing them, she was brokenhearted; when she heard the sea eagle cry from the direction of Sluys, in the country, she went towards the cry. Going in the meadow at the foot of a dyke of faggots and green sod, she heard from the other side of the dyke the two devils talking together. One said: