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Prior. It is then premeditated murder you have committed.

Ost. (hastily.) Call it so, call it so.

Jer. (to Osterloo, after a pause.) And is this all? Will you not proceed to tell us the circumstances attending it?

Ost. Oh! they were terrible!— But they are all in my mind as the indistinct horrors of a frenzied imagination. (After a short pause.) I did it in a narrow pass on St. Gothard, in the stormy twilight of a winter day.

Prior. You murdered him there?

Ost. I felt him dead under my grasp; but I looked at him no more after the last desperate thrust that I gave him. I hurried to a distance from the spot; when a servant, who was with me, seized with a sudden remorse, begged leave to return and remove the body, that, if possible, he might bury it in consecrated ground, as an atonement for the part he had taken in the terrible deed.I gave him leave, with means to procure his desire:—I waited for him three days, concealed in the mountains;—but I neither saw him, nor heard of him again.

Ben. But what tempted a brave man like Osterloo to commit such a horrible act?

Ost. The torments of jealousy stung me to it. (Hiding his face with his hands, and then uncovering it.) I loved her, and was beloved:He came,—a noble stranger

Jer. Aye, if he was in his mortal state, as I