"I cannot again go through," said Antonio with a sigh, "what I suffered from that alien mother. She held my father as under enchantment; and he was readier to wrong all his old friends, readier to wrong his own son, than in anywise to offend her. At last however their behaviour to each other altered; but my heart almost broke at the sight of their hatred, while before it had only bled at the insults I had to endure." "So there was plenty of bitter malice," askt the old hag with a nauseous grin, "throughout the whole family?" Antonio eyed her with a sharp look, and said confusedly: "I know not how I have come to be talking here about my own and my parents misery." The old woman swallowed a bumper of red wine, which stood like blood in the glass. Then with a loud laugh she said: "Faith, I know no such glorious pleasure, nothing, I mean, so like what one may call perfect rapture and bliss, as when such a wedded couple, who in earlier days were once a pair of fond lovers, fall out in this way, and snarl and snap at each other, like cat and dog, or two tiger-beasts, and scold and curse each other, and would each give up heart and soul to Satan, only to hurt and pain or to get rid of the other. This, my young lad, is the true glory of mortal life: but more especially, if the two yoke-fellows have of yore gone stark mad with love, if they have done everything, even what is a little bit out of the way, for each other, if they have waded through much of what certain good pious folks would call crimes and sins, merely for the sake of getting at one another, merely for the sake of at last tying the knot, which they now so cordially abhor. Trust me, this is a grand feast for Satan and all his comrades, and it makes those below keep jubilee and sing psalms. And here now even ... but I'll hold my tongue; I might easily say too much." Crescentia lookt mournfully at the astonisht youth. "Forgive her," she whispered: "you see she has drunk too much; pity her." But in Antonio's soul there now rose up with fresh power the image of former times and all their dark scenes. The sorrowful day came back upon him, when he saw his stepmother on her deathbed, when his father was in despair and curst himself and the hour of his birth, and called upon the spirit of his first wife and prayed for forgiveness. "Have you nothing else to tell?" askt the old woman, and thereby awakened him from his dreamy amaze. "What shall I tell?" said Antonio, with the deepest anguish: "do not you seem to know everything, or else to have learnt it by soothsay? Need I tell you that an old servant, Roberto, poisoned her, having been persecuted by her hatred and thus spurred on to revenge himself? that this accursed villain attempted to throw the crime upon my father? He escapes from prison, scales the garden-wall, and in the grotto thrusts his dagger into my father's breast."