Page:Tales from Chaucer.djvu/239

 When he beheld the patience of his wife, he cast down his eyes, wondering at her constancy, yet glad at heart: with a show of sorrow, however, in his countenance, he left the room. His place was supplied by the same ill-looking minion that had performed his master's former hateful errand; who seized her lovely child and bore it away amid the blessings and embraces of its mother; yet carrying it tenderly, as he did its sister, to the Countess at Bologna.

It is not to be supposed that these acts on the part of the Marquis were executed in so secret a corner but that the vileness of their odour bewrayed itself. The slander against him had begun to spread far and wide, that, wickedly, and with a cruel heart, he had first taken to wife a woman in poverty, and had afterwards privately murdered her children. He then, who had been the idol of his people, now became the object of their abhorrence. Notwithstanding all which fearful rumour (and the stigma of murderer is the heaviest load that can be thrown upon a man's conscience), such was the cruelty of his purpose, and the determination of his obstinacy, that he would not