ering in his misery at the window, were now alike unheeded.
In the bewildered and brutalised minds of the guests, one sensation
alone remained--the intensity of expectation which precedes the result
of a deadly strife.

But ere long--awakening the attention which might otherwise never have
been aroused--the voice of the hunchback was heard, as the spirit of
repentance now moved within him, uttering, in wild, moaning tones, a
strange confession of degradation and sin--addressed to none;
proceeding, independent of consciousness or will, from the depths of
his stricken soul. He half raised himself, and fixed his sunken eyes
upon the dead body, as these words dropped from his lips: 'It was the
last time that I beheld her alive, when she approached me--lonely, and
feeble, and poor--in the street, beseeching me to return to her in the
days of her old age and her solitude, and to remember how she had loved
me in my childhood for my very deformity, how she had watched me
throughout the highways of Rome, that none should oppress or deride me!
The tears ran down her cheeks, she knelt to me on the hard pavement,
and I, who had deserted her for her poverty, to make myself a slave in
palaces among the accursed rich, flung down money to her as to a beggar
who wearied me, and passed on! She died desolate; her body lay
unburied, and I knew it not! The son who had abandoned the mother
never saw her more, until she rose before him there--avenging,
horrible, lifeless--a sight of death never to leave him! Woe, woe to
the accursed in his deformity, and the accursed of his mother's corpse!'

He paused, and fell back again to the ground, grovelling and
speechless. The tyrannic Thascius, regarding him with a scowl of
drunken wrath, seized an empty vase, and poising it in his unsteady
hand, prepared to hurl it at the hunchback's prostrate form, when again
a single cry--a woman's--rising above the increasing uproar in the
street, rang shrill and startling through the banqueting-hall. The
patrician suspended his purpose as he heard it, mechanically listening
with the half-stupid, half-cunning attention of intoxication. 'Help!
help!' shrieked the voice beneath the palace windows--'he follows me
still--he attacked my dead child in my arms! As I flung myself down
upon it on the ground, I saw him watching his opportunity to drag it by
the limbs from under me--famine and madness were in his eyes--I drove
him back--I fled--he follows me still!-