er of the murdered boy. He had her
fetched to Moscow from her convent, and told her of this pretender who
was setting up a claim to the throne of Russia, supported by the King of
Poland.

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 us