She listened impassively, standing before him in the black robes and conventual coif which his tyranny had imposed upon her. When he had done, a faint smile swept over the face that had grown so hard in these last twelve years since that day when her boy had been slain almost under her very eyes. “It is a circumstantial tale,” she said. “It is perhaps true. It is probably true.” “True!” He bounded from his seat. “True? What are you saying, woman? Yourself you saw the boy dead.” “I did, and I know who killed him.” “But you saw him. You recognized him for your own, since you set the people on to kill those whom you believed had slain him.” “Yes,” she answered. And added the question: “What do you want of me now?” “What do I want?” He was amazed that she should ask, exasperated. Had the conventual confinement turned her head? “I want your testimony. I want you to denounce this fellow for the impostor that he is. The people will believe you.” “You think they will?” Interest had kindled in her glance. “What else? Are you not the mother of Demetrius, and shall not a mother know her own son?” “You forget. He was ten years of age then—a child. Now he is a grown man of three-and-twenty. How can I be sure? How can I be sure of anything?” He swore a full round oath at her. “Because you saw him dead.” “Yet I may have been mistaken. I thought I knew the agents of yours who killed him. Yet you made me swear—as the price of my brothers’ lives—that I was mistaken. Perhaps I was more mistaken than we thought. Perhaps my little Demetrius was not slain at all. Perhaps this man’s tale is true.” “Perhaps...” He broke off to stare at her, mistrustfully, searchingly. “What do you mean?” he asked her sharply. Again that wan smile crossed the hard, sharp-featured face that once had been so lovely. “I mean that if the devil came out of hell and called himself my son, I should acknowledge him to your undoing.” Thus the pent-up hate and bitterness of years of brooding upon her wrongs broke forth. Taken aback, he quailed before it. His jaw dropped foolishly, and he stared at her with wide, unblinking eyes. “The people will believe me, you say—they will believe that a mother should know her own son. Then are your hours of usurpation numbered.” If for a moment it appalled him, yet in the end, forewarned, he was forearmed. It was foolish of her to let him look upon the weapon with which she could destroy him. The result of it was that she went back to her convent under close guard, and was thereafter confined with greater rigour than hitherto. Desperately Boris heard how the belief in Demetrius was gaining ground in Russia with the people. The nobles might still be sceptical, but Boris knew that he could not trust them, since they had no cause to love him. He began perhaps to realize that it is not good to rule by fear.