"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. But the pang is
past,