ed onto his face, bringing with
it warm drops of rain.

Involuntarily he glanced up at the thing swinging above his
head--heartbroken as he was at having had to leave Troyes with his
child still unfound, he could not refrain from doing that!--and
wondered who and what the malefactor had been who was thus exalted.
And as he lowered his eyes from the ghastly mass of corruption, he saw
against the gibbet a thicker, darker thing than the gallows tree
itself--a thing surmounted by a white, corpselike face, from which
stared a pair of large gray eyes at him--eyes in which, as the clouds
scurried by beneath the moon, the moon itself shone dazzlingly,
lighting them up and showing their large pupils.

The horse saw them too, and started forward a pace or so until reined
in by his master's hand, and then whimpered and quivered all over,
while its rider, with his own flesh creeping, bent over his saddle and
peered toward the dark form surmounted by the pallid face and glaring
eyes.

"Who in Heaven's name are you?" St. Georges whispered, "and why select
this ghastly spot to stand in and affright passers-by? What are you,
man or woman?" and he leaned still further over his demi-pique to gaze
at the figure, though as he did so his right hand stole to his sword
hilt.

"A woman," a voice answered. "A woman who comes here to weep her
husband's death. He"--and she cast the staring gray eyes upward to the
object swinging with each gust of the wind in its chains--"was my
husband. Pass on, and leave me with his murdered remains."

"Murdered! Rather, poor soul, say executed. Murderers slay not thus."

Slowly the figure left the foot of the gibbet as he spoke, so that he
saw she was a tall young woman of the peasant class, clad in dark,
poor clothes, and slowly she advanced the few yards that separated
them, whereby he could observe her features and notice more plainly
the awful whiteness of her face.

"Murdered, I say!" she replied, still with the glare in her eyes.
"Murdered! Wrongfully accused, foully tried, falsely condemned. Done
to death wickedly as a _braconnier_. But he was none--yet there he
swings. O God! that life can be so easily torn from us by the
powerful!"

"Who, then, has done this deed?" St. Georges asked, deeply stirred by
the woman's wild sorrow, perhaps also by the gloomy surroundings. "Who
can do such things as this, even though powerful?"

"Who?" she replied. "Who? Who but one in these parts? The hound, De