"Hag! thou hast passed the limits to which, remembering who thou art, my forbearance gave thee licence.

I had well-nigh forgot that thou hadst assumed my part--I am the Accuser! Woman!--the boy!--shrink not! equivocate not! lie not!--thou wert the thief!" "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.