Eckhardt pointed to her lifeless clay. In his livid face burnt relentless, unforgiving wrath.
"Throw that woman over the ramparts!" he turned to his men. "She shall not have Christian burial!"
Anew Sylvester intervened.
"Back!" he commanded the guards. "Judge not,—that ye may not be judged. What has passed between those two—lies beyond the pale of human ken. He alone, who has called, has the right to judge them! She died absolved.—May God have mercy on her soul!"
As weeping those present turned to leave the death-chamber, Eckhardt bent over the still, dead face of Otto.
"I will hold the death-watch," he turned to Sylvester. "Have the bier prepared! To-morrow at dawn we start. We return to our Saxon-land,—we go back across the Alps. In the crypts of Aix-la-Chapelle the grandson of the great Otto shall rest; he shall sleep by the side of the great emperor, whom he visited ere he came hither; Charlemagne's phantom has claimed him at last. Rome shall not have a lock of his hair!"
"As you say—so shall it be!" replied Sylvester, his gaze turning from Otto to the lifeless clay of Stephania.
Softly he raised her dead body and laid it side by side with that of Theophano's son, joining their hands.
"Though they shall sleep apart in distant lands, their souls are one in the great beyond, that holds no mysteries for the departed."
From the chapel of the cloister at the foot of the hill, stealing through the solemn stillness of the December morning, came the chant of the monks: