“What would ye have of me?” she said, addressing the judge, and for the first time standing unveiled before him. “As there is a God in whom we both believe, I have told you only the truth. I am a stranger, a foreigner, a defenceless woman, but not the less the affianced bride of one of your proudest nobles, the Count de Garonne.” The tone in which she spoke was firm, but oh! how touchingly sweet; and her words were uttered in broken French, with a perceptible Oriental accent. Loud murmurs arose in her favor as she ceased speaking. The tide was turning. But the judge now spoke: “Out on thee, woman of hell! Out on thee for a base slanderer of a noble of France, and a holy crusader! Thou the betrothed bride of Garonne! As soon would the eagle mate with the vulture. I tell thee, woman, that thy story of having been shipwrecked when coming to France, and of all thy train having been lost except thy two Ethiopian myrmidons, is a foul lie, and I am almost minded to wring the truth from thee on the rack.” “I have said it,” said the prisoner, in a firm voice, for she felt her life depended on her calmness, “and if you will give but one week, only one little week, I will prove it before man as well as God. I came from Syria in the same fleet with my lord, but under charge of his mother’s confessor—now a saint in Heaven!—but being separated by a storm, in which our galley was shipwrecked, I was thrown unprotected on your shores. I am a stranger here. My servants even have deserted me. I do no one harm. I plot no treason. All I ask is to pass on my way. Oh!” she continued, with a burst of emotion, “if you have a daughter, think what would be your feelings if she was to be thus set upon in a strange land,” and she burst into tears. Again the crowd murmured in her favor. “Woman!” sternly interposed the judge, unmoved by her emotion, “look at the victim of your sorcery, and seek no longer to deceive us by your lies. Stand forth, Philip the Deformed!” At the words of the judge, an official bearing a white wand stepped into a side room, and in a moment reappeared with a cripple hideously deformed, whom the populace recognised as the landlord of the hostelry. When confronted with the prisoner, he glared on her with a look of demoniac hatred. “Know you this woman?” asked the judge.