"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.
He remained thus, prostrate and unmanned, for a considerable time, growing slowly and gradually more calm as tears relieved his emotion; and, at length, rather indulging a gloomy reverie than a passionate grief.

The moon was high and the hour late when he arose, and then few traces of the past excitement remained upon his countenance; for Walter de Montreal was not of that mould in which woe can force a settlement, or to which any affliction can bring the continued and habitual melancholy that darkens those who feel more enduringly, though with emotions less stormy.

His were the elements of the true Franc character, though carried to excess: his sternest and his deepest qualities were mingled with fickleness and caprice; his profound sagacity often frustrated by a whim; his towering ambition deserted for some frivolous temptation; and his elastic, sanguine, and high-spirited nature, faithful only to the desire of military glory, to the poetry of a daring and stormy life, and to the susceptibilities of that tender passion without whose colourings no portrait of chivalry is complete, and in which he was capable of a sentiment, a tenderness, and a loyal devotion, which could hardly have been supposed compatible with his reckless levity and his undisciplined career.
"Well," said he, as he rose slowly, folded his mantle round him, and resumed his way, "it was not for myself I grieved thus.