“Let him have his way, my darling,” said the monk to Bertha.  “Disobedient children often become great characters.”

Bertha ate sparingly, for her heart was as swollen as a sponge in water.  At the first mouthful, the monk, who was a great scholar, felt in his stomach a pain, and on his palette a bitter taste of poison that caused him to suspect that the Sire de Bastarnay had given them all their quietus.  Before he had made this discovery Bertha had eaten.  Suddenly the monk pulled off the tablecloth and flung everything into the fireplace, telling Bertha his suspicion.  Bertha thanked the Virgin that her son had been so taken up with his sport.  Retaining his presence of mind, Jehan, who had not forgotten the lesson he had learned as a page, leaped into the courtyard, lifted his son from the horse, sprang across it himself, and flew across the country with such speed that you would have thought him a shooting-star if you had seen him digging the spurs into the horse’s bleeding flanks, and he was at Loches in Fallotte’s house in the same space of time that only the devil could have done the journey.  He stated the case to her in two words, for the poison was already frying his marrow, and requested her to give him an antidote.

“Alas,” said the sorceress, “had I known that it was for you I was giving this poison, I would have received in my breast the dagger’s point, with which I was threatened, and would have sacrificed my poor life to save that of a man of God, and of the sweetest woman that ever blossomed on this earth; for alas! my dear friend, I have only two drops of the counter-poison that you see in this phial.”

“Is there enough for her?”

“Yes, but go at once,” said the old hag.

The monk came back more quickly that he went, so that the horse died under him in the courtyard.  He rushed into the room where Bertha, believing her last hour to be come, was kissing her son, and writhing like a lizard in the fire, uttering no cry for herself, but for the child, left to the wrath of Bastarnay, forgetting her own agony at the thought of his cruel future.

“Take this,” said the monk; “my life is saved!”

Jehan had the great courage to say these words with an unmoved face, although he felt the claws of death seizing his heart.  Hardly had Bertha drunk when the prior fell dead, not, however, without kissing his son, and regarding his dear lady with an eye that changed not even after his last sigh.  This sight turned her as cold as marble, and terrified her so much that she remained rigid before this dead man, stretched at her feet, pressing the hand of her child, who wept, although her own eye was as dry as the Red Sea when the Hebrews crossed it under the leadership of Baron Moses, for it seemed to her that she had sharp sand rolling under her eyelids.  Pray for her, ye charitable souls, for never was woman so agonised, in divining that her lover has saved her life at the