at their intrusion, though commanded by duty.

"Who passes there?" said the count, with the quick and eager voice of one to whom suspicion and anxiety had become habitual. The attendants pointed out to him Pierre and Genevieve.

"I know that voice," said Pierre, "though I must never behold the lips that utter it, in this life."

Count Raymond recognized the sound, and caught in his mailed grasp the withered hand of the ancient pastor. "This hand pointed my way to life," he cried, as he asked his benediction.

Of all the barbes or teachers of the Albigeois, Count Raymond had confidence in Pierre alone, inspired and justified by the unearthly purity and apostolic simplicity of his spirit, character, and views; and the expression of this confidence was rendered more affecting by recent danger, and solemn from the circumstances of their meeting and the mute farewell which closed it.

"Israelite in whom, indeed, is no guile," murmured Count Raymond, rejoining his band; "I have seen thee, perchance, for the last time, but when shall I behold thy like?" Thus honoured and greeted, the ancient man was borne on, and when they had wound their way through the defile, so fatal to the Crusaders the preceding day, Genevieve, dismissing Amand, prepared to follow Pierre and his attendants.

Their path was now less obstructed by corses and broken armour, but often Genevieve shrunk from these objects which their loneliness rendered more ghastly; and she was alarmed by the distant and increasing tumult, which she guessed to proceed from the men-at-arms issuing from the Castle of Courtenaye, whose war-cries, calling on their fallen lords, rang wild and wide among the dark hills.

As grasping at the branches of the larch and fir, and the crags amid whose fissures they sprang, they toiled up their arduous way, a sudden blaze of light flashed on

them, and Genevieve, giving a sign to their guides to pause, gazed fearfully round her for the cause, and at a little distance beheld, under the shade of a gigantic ash-tree, a sad and noble sight. It was a woman, magnificently habited, who sat on the ground with the body of a warrior stretched on her knees. His helmet, gorget, and vantbrace, were off, so that all the lineaments of death were visible in his pallid but still ferocious aspect. Two priests stood by, who appeared too much terrified to pray; there were female attendants, who seemed to suppress their grief from reverence for the lady; and pages in silence held the torches, whose light, falling on the dark grey trunk of the ash-tree, gave a kind of ghastly background to the figures of the group. lady sat gazing on the body; her hands were clasped on her forehead, and the jewelled bracelets with which her arms were bound, discovered her rank; her face was as pale as that of the warrior, and the silence of her

The

despair seemed to have awed her attendants into silence also.

"And is it thou?" she said at last, in a voice hoarse and broken-"this livid, cold, helpless thing is this Simon de Montfort?" ---and something between a shriek and a laugh burst from her lips. The women, seeming to take this as a signal, broke into lamentations.

"Hush," she said, "weep for women or for babes; the warrior and the noble must have the death-groan of a thousand for his dirge.'

The priests then seemed to whisper consolation, or offer masses for the dead; she shook her head. "I knew thy bold spirit well,” she exclaimed, addressing the corse, "and if it retains aught of its former strain, it would joy less in Paradise for a hundred masses than for one war-cry thundered in battle. No, my husband-mine no more-for the tears of women and the prayers of priests, the blood of a thousand churls shall fall for every noble drop of thine, and thy tomb shall be the bravest warrior ever slept in--the bones

of a thousand enemies. So swears the widow of De Montfort, and Christendom shall see her oath fulfilled."

Awe-struck by what she saw and heard, Genevieve attempted to hasten on, when the sound of a low and feeble moaning caught her ear; and near this spot she beheld an Albigeoise supporting her son, a dying youth, on her knees; she, too, was seated on the earth; but there were no attendants, no torches, no gems blazing around the figure of despair and passion. The mother wiped with her kerchief, from time to time, the blood and froth that gathered on the lips of her son, and often pressed her's to them with a brief agony she checked, to catch the hope which the sufferer tried to breathe, or to whisper it when that breath was suspended by pain. Her words betokened more anxiety about the immortal than the mortal part; she spoke, while yet she had hopes of being heard, of the blessed frame in which a believer should depart; she even, with choked voice and bursting heart, reminded him that for