Roquemaure!"

"De Roquemaure!" St. Georges exclaimed with a start that caused his
trembling horse to move forward, thinking that he had pressed its
flanks to urge it on, which start was perfectly perceptible to the
unhappy woman. "De Roquemaure!"

"You know him?" she asked eagerly, bending her face toward and up to
him so that he could see her pale lips--lips, indeed, almost as pale
as her cheeks--"you know him?"

"I know of him," St. Georges replied.

"And hate him, perhaps, as I do. It may be, would kill him as I would.
Is it so? Answer me?"

Carried away by this strange encounter, and with so strange a third
thing near them as _that_ above, which once had life as they had
still; carried away, too, by the woman's vehemence--a vehemence which
caused her, a peasant, to speak on equal terms with one whose dress
and accoutrements showed the difference between them--he answered
almost in a whisper:

"It may be," he said, bending down still further to her, "that I shall
be doomed to kill him some day. May be that he has merited death at my
hands."

"You hate him?"

"I fear I have but too just cause to hate him."

"As all do! As all! He lives," she went on, "but to slay and injure
others as he slew and injured him," and she half turned her head and
cast up her eyes at the miserable relic above her. Then she continued:
"Listen. _He_ was no poacher, no thief. But I--I--his wife--was
unfortunate enough to fall under the other's notice--he sought me--you
understand?--and _he_"--with again the upward glance--"resisted his
desires. You see the end!"

Looking into her eyes, observing her well-defined features, noticing
that, except for her awful pallor, she might well be a handsome woman,
especially when bright and happy instead of, as now, grief-stained,
St. Georges could understand. Then, while also he meditated as to
whether this De Roquemaure was a fiend that had taken human shape, the
woman went on:

"Daily almost some fall under his bane. But a week ago a stranger
here--one carrying a helpless babe--was set upon----"

"What!" and now he felt as though the universe was spinning round.

--"was set upon," she continued, "struck to death--he is dying now, or
dead----"

"And the babe?" St. Georges interposed.

"Carried off by those who did his bidding."

"O God! Lost again!" and the moan he uttered startled the woman out of
her own grief.

"Who are you?" she asked, her great eyes piercing him.

"As I beli