“I was.  Thou taughtest me the lesson how to steal a—­”

“Render—­restore him!” interrupted Montreal, stamping on the ground with such force that the splinters of the marble fragments on which he stood shivered under his armed heel.

The woman little heeded a violence at which the fiercest warrior of Italy might have trembled; but she did not make an immediate answer.  The character of her countenance altered from passion into an expression of grave, intent, and melancholy thought.  At length she replied to Montreal; whose hand had wandered to his dagger-hilt, with the instinct of long habit, whenever enraged or thwarted, rather than from any design of blood; which, stern and vindictive as he was, he would have been incapable of forming against any woman,—­much less against the one then before him.

“Walter de Montreal,” said she, in a voice so calm that it almost sounded like that of compassion, “the boy, I think, has never known brother or sister:  the only child of a once haughty and lordly race, on both sides, though now on both dishonoured—­nay, why so impatient? thou wilt soon learn the worst—­the boy is dead!”

“Dead!” repeated Montreal, recoiling and growing pale; “dead!—­no, no—­say not that!  He has a mother,—­you know he has!—­a fond, meekhearted, anxious, hoping mother!—­no!—­no, he is not dead!”

“Thou canst feel, then, for a mother?” said the old woman, seemingly touched by the tone of the Provencal.  “Yet, bethink thee; is it not better that the grave should save him from a life of riot, of bloodshed, and of crime?  Better to sleep with God than to wake with the fiends!”

“Dead!” echoed Montreal; “dead!—­the pretty one!—­so young!—­those eyes—­the mother’s eyes—­closed so soon?”

“Hast thou aught else to say?  Thy sight scares my very womanhood from my soul!—­let me be gone.”

“Dead!—­may I believe thee? or dost thou mock me?  Thou hast uttered thy curse, hearken to my warning:—­If thou hast lied in this, thy last hour shall dismay thee, and thy death-bed shall be the death-bed of despair!”

“Thy lips,” replied the female, with a scornful smile, “are better adapted for lewd vows to unhappy maidens, than for the denunciations which sound solemn only when coming from the good.  Farewell!”

“Stay! inexorable woman! stay!—­where sleeps he?  Masses shall be sung! priests shall pray!—­the sins of the father shall not be visited on that young head!”

“At Florence!” returned the woman, hastily.  “But no stone records the departed one!—­The dead boy had no name!”

Waiting for no further questionings, the woman now passed on,—­pursued her way;—­and the long herbage, and the winding descent, soon snatched her ill-omened apparition from the desolate landscape.

Montreal, thus alone, sunk with a deep and heavy sigh upon the ground, covered his face with his hands, and burst into an agony of grief; his chest heaved, his whole frame trembled, and he wept and sobbed aloud, with all the fearful vehemence of a man whose passions are strong and fierce, but to whom the violence of grief alone is novel and unfamiliar.