“Died!” she repeated, “died! Then it is really true? Oh, Gill, you were born of my misery; you were conceived in terror and born in sorrow; your lips lacerated my breast; as a child, you never returned my caresses or embraces; you always shunned and repulsed your mother, your lonely and forsaken mother! You never tried to make me forget my past distress, save by causing me fresh injury. You deserted me for the demon author of your existence and of my widowhood. Never, in long years, Gill, never did you procure me one thrill of pleasure; and yet to-day your death, my son, seems to me the most insupportable of all my afflictions. Your memory to-day seems to me to be twined with comfort and rapture. Alas! alas!” She could not go on; she covered her head with her coarse black woollen veil, and sobbed bitterly. “Weak woman!” muttered the hermit; then he continued in a firm voice: “Control your grief; I laugh at mine. Listen, Lucy Pelryhn. While you still weep for your son, I have already begun to avenge him. It was for a soldier in the Munkholm regiment that his sweetheart betrayed him. The whole regiment shall perish by my hands. Look, Lucy Pelryhn!” He had rolled up the sleeves of his gown, and showed the widow his misshapen arms stained with blood. “Yes,” he said with a fierce roar, “Gill’s spirit shall delight to haunt Urchtal Sands and Cascadthymore ravine. Come, woman, do you not see this blood? Be comforted!” Then all at once, as if struck by a sudden thought, he interrupted himself: “Widow, did you not receive an iron casket from me? What! I sent you gold and I bring you blood, and you still weep. Are you not human?” The widow, absorbed in her despair, was silent. “What!” said he, with a fierce laugh, “motionless and mute. You are no woman, then, Lucy Pelryhn!” and he shook her by the arm to rouse her. “Did not a messenger bring you an iron casket?” The widow, lending him a brief attention, shook her head, and relapsed into her gloomy revery. “Ah, the wretch!” cried the little man, “the miserable traitor! Spiagudry, that gold shall cost you dear!” And stripping off his gown, he rushed from the hut with the growl of a hyena that scents a corpse. XVII. My lord, I braid my hair; I braid it with salt tears because you leave me alone, and because you go hence into the hills.--_The Count’s Lady_ (_Old Romance_). Ethel, meantime, had already reckoned four long and weary days since she was left to wander alone in the dark garden of Schleswig tower; alone in the oratory, the witness of so many tears, the confidant of so many longings; alone in the long gallery, where once upon a time she had failed to hear the midnight bell. Her aged father sometimes accompanied her, but she was none the less alone, for the true companion of her life was absent.