"It is only what they have done," complained the woman. "Oh, I was pious and good like you once; I would have been content if only they would have let me see Donatus for one hour."
The rider pulled up his horse behind the bushes, and dismounted to listen.
"Only one hour," she went on, "in return for a whole ruined life-time! But even that they would not grant me--not even that. No, let me be, I have nothing but curses that I can fling at their heads; give me an arm to strike with, and I will spare my words."
"Woman," cried a voice suddenly behind her, "here is the arm you need to carry out your curse, I am just in the mood for such a task!"
The child started up in alarm at seeing the grim looking man, and fled to the other side of her mother.
The woman gazed thoughtfully at the stranger; something in his face struck her, but she could not tell what. The rider tied up his horse, and flung himself down on his cloak by the woman's side.
"Your rage is against the monks of Marienberg; what have they done to you?"
And the woman told him at full length all that had happened from the beginning, how she had lost her child and her husband for the sake of the strange infant, and how she had loved him so much all the same, that she would willingly have sacrificed everything if only she might have clasped him once to her heart, and have made her last confession to him. But not even that would they grant her, a dying woman. They had driven the little girl from the door, and called her an adder. Ah! and there was a great weight on her mind about the girl too, and now the child must perish miserably; for when she was dead there would be no one to care for her in all the wide world.
The stranger looked absently at the child; he paused for a moment as if the large, tawny-brown eyes with their dark, meeting brows had struck him; but another idea possessed him wholly.
"And you do not know who the boy was that you nursed?" he asked almost breathlessly.