"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 Roquemaure!"
"De Roquemaure!" St. Georges exclaimed with a start that caused his trembling horse to move forward, thinking that he had pressed its flanks to urge it on, which start was perfectly perceptible to the unhappy woman. "De Roquemaure!"
"You know him?" she asked eagerly, bending her face toward and up to him so that he could see her pale lips—lips, indeed, almost as pale as her cheeks—"you know him?"
"I know of him," St. Georges replied.
"And hate him, perhaps, as I do. It may be, would kill him as I would. Is it so? Answer me?"
Carried away by this strange encounter, and with so strange a third thing near them as that above, which once had life as they had still; carried away, too, by the woman's vehemence—a vehemence which caused her, a peasant, to speak on equal terms with one whose dress and accoutrements showed the difference between them—he answered almost in a whisper:
"It may be," he said, bending down still further to her, "that I shall be doomed to kill him some day. May be that he has merited death at my hands."
"You hate him?"