This vehement personage was standing one morning at the door of the chapel in a state of unusual thoughtfulness, when he beheld coming towards him, through a path in the green meadow before it, a lady of a lovely aspect, accompanied by a bearded monk.  They were followed by something covered with black, which they were bringing along on a great horse.

Alas! the lady was the widow of Zerbino, the Scottish prince, who spared the life of Medoro, and who now himself lay dead under that pall.  He had expired in her arms from wounds inflicted during a combat with Mandricardo; and she had been thrown by the loss into such anguish of mind that she would have died on his sword but for the intervention of the hermit now with her, who persuaded her to devote the rest of her days to God in a nunnery.  She had now come into Provence with the good man for that purpose, and to bury the corpse of her husband in the chapel which they were approaching.

Though the lady seemed lost in grief, and was very pale, and had her hair all about the ears, and though she did nothing but weep and lament, and looked in all respects quite borne down with her misery, nevertheless she was still so beautiful that love and grace appeared to be indestructible in her aspect.  The moment the Saracen beheld her, he dismissed from his mind all the determinations he had made to hate and detest

  The gentle bevy, that adorns the world.

He was bent solely on obtaining the new angel before him.  She seemed precisely the sort of person to make him forget the one that had rejected him.  Advancing, therefore, to meet her without delay, he begged, in as gentle a manner as he could assume, to know the cause of her sorrow.

The lady, with all the candour of wretchedness, explained who she was, and how precious a burden she was conveying to its last home, and the resolution she had taken to withdraw from a vain world into the service of God.  The proud pagan, who had no belief in a God, much less any respect for restraints or fidelities of what kind soever, forgot his assumed gravity when he heard this determination, and laughed outright at the simplicity of such a proceeding.  He pronounced it, in his peremptory way, to be foolish and frivolous; compared it with the miser who, in burying a treasure, does good neither to himself nor any one else; and said, that lions and serpents might indeed be shut up in cages, but not things lovely and innocent.

The monk, overhearing these observations, thought it his duty to interfere.  He calmly opposed all which the other asserted, and then proceeded to set forth a repast of spiritual consolation not at all to the Saracen’s taste.  The fierce warrior interrupted the preacher several times; told him that he had nothing to do with the lady, and that the sooner he returned to his cell the better; but the hermit, nothing daunted, went on with his advice till his antagonist lost all patience.  He laid hands on his sacred person; seized him by the beard; tore away as much of it as he grasped; and at length worked himself up into such a pitch of fury, that he griped the good man’s throat with all the force of a pair of pincers, and, swinging him twice or thrice round, as one might a dog, flung him off the headland into the sea.