The corpse at the foot of the banqueting-table, and the wretch cowering in his misery at the window, were now alike unheeded.
In the bewildered and brutalised minds of the guests, one sensation alone remained--the intensity of expectation which precedes the result of a deadly strife.
But ere long--awakening the attention which might otherwise never have been aroused--the voice of the hunchback was heard, as the spirit of repentance now moved within him, uttering, in wild, moaning tones, a strange confession of degradation and sin--addressed to none; proceeding, independent of consciousness or will, from the depths of his stricken soul.

He half raised himself, and fixed his sunken eyes upon the dead body, as these words dropped from his lips: 'It was the last time that I beheld her alive, when she approached me--lonely, and feeble, and poor--in the street, beseeching me to return to her in the days of her old age and her solitude, and to remember how she had loved me in my childhood for my very deformity, how she had watched me throughout the highways of Rome, that none should oppress or deride me! The tears ran down her cheeks, she knelt to me on the hard pavement, and I, who had deserted her for her poverty, to make myself a slave in palaces among the accursed rich, flung down money to her as to a beggar who wearied me, and passed on! She died desolate; her body lay unburied, and I knew it not! The son who had abandoned the mother never saw her more, until she rose before him there--avenging, horrible, lifeless--a sight of death never to leave him! Woe, woe to the accursed in his deformity, and the accursed of his mother's corpse!' He paused, and fell back again to the ground, grovelling and speechless.

The tyrannic Thascius, regarding him with a scowl of drunken wrath, seized an empty vase, and poising it in his unsteady hand, prepared to hurl it at the hunchback's prostrate form, when again a single cry--a woman's--rising above the increasing uproar in the street, rang shrill and startling through the banqueting-hall.

The patrician suspended his purpose as he heard it, mechanically listening with the half-stupid, half-cunning attention of intoxication.

'Help! help!' shrieked the voice beneath the palace windows--'he follows me still--he attacked my dead child in my arms! As I flung myself down upon it on the ground, I saw him watching his opportunity to drag it by the limbs from under me--famine and madness were in his eyes--I drove him back--I fled--he follows me still!--save us, save us!' At this instant her voice was suddenly stifled in the sound of fierce cries and rushing footsteps, followed by an appalling noise of heavy blows, directed at several points, against the steel railings before the palace doors.