the leg had wreaked that destruction on his vigour which the first had
effected on his beauty. He was a cripple.

At the instant of his awakening the woman had started up. She now
raised him from the ground, and taking some herbs from her bosom,
applied them to his wounded cheek. By this action her dress became
discomposed: it was stiff at the top with coagulated blood, which had
evidently flowed from a cut in her neck.

All her attempts to compose the child were in vain; he moaned and wept
piteously, muttering at intervals his disjointed exclamations of
impatience at the coldness of the place and the agony of his recent
wounds. Speechless and tearless the wretched woman looked vacantly down
on his face. There was little difficulty in discerning from that fixed,
distracted gaze the nature of the tie that bound the mourning woman to
the suffering boy. The expression of rigid and awful despair that
lowered in her fixed, gloomy eyes, the livid paleness that discoloured
her compressed lips, the spasms that shook her firm, commanding form,
mutely expressing in the divine eloquence of human emotion that between
the solitary pair there existed the most intimate of earth's
relationships--the connection of mother and child.

For some time no change occurred in the woman's demeanour. At last, as
if struck by some sudden suspicion, she rose, and clasping the child in
one arm, displaced with the other the brushwood at the entrance of her
place of refuge, cautiously looking forth on all that the mists left
visible of the western landscape. After a short survey she drew back as
if reassured by the unbroken solitude of the place, and turning towards
the lake, looked down upon the black waters at her feet.