His beloved Ida was found to have been dead for many minutes. Her heart was cold, her pulses still, and when the cry of Chute brought, by its strange and unnatural sound, all the household thronging to the room in alarm and amazement, Vane was found hanging over her, and weeping as only women weep, and with all the wild and passionate abandonment he had never felt since childhood. Had she seen, as they had at last, this haunting figure, whose vicinity caused that mysterious icy chill and tremor which nevermore would shock her delicate system and lovely form? Had the--to her--long unseen been visible at last--that pale, solemn face with its sad, dark eyes and black moustache? It almost seemed so, for terror dwelt on her still features for a time, then repose, sadness, and sweetness stole over her beautiful face--still most beautiful in death. Had she died of terror, of grief, or of both, inducing perhaps a rupture of the heart? The pressure of her hands upon her breast would seem to say the latter, but all was wild and sad conjecture now in the startled and sorrowing household. So ended the _haunted life_! But the doctors discussed the subject learnedly, and her nervous thrills or involuntary tremors were accounted for by one who asserted 'that such an emotion was producible in persons of a certain nervous _diathesis_ by the approach alike of an unseen spirit or the impingement of an electric fluid evolved by the superior will of another.' It was urged by some that anything supernatural could only be seen by a person who was under an extraordinary exaltation of the sensuous perceptions, and certainly this was not the case with either Desmond, Vane, or Chute; thus it was deemed doubly strange that such men as they should have seen this singular and terrible presence, when she, whose system was of the most refined and delicate nature, and rendered more spiritual by her sinking health, should only have felt that something unseen was near her, until, perhaps, that fatal night. What miracle, _diablerie_, or spiritualistic horror was this? speculated all, when the story came to be sifted around the couch whereon the dead Ida lay, like a marble statue, with her skin soft and pale as a white camellia leaf. Can it be, they asked, that 'his solicitude cannot rest with his bones,' far away in that Indian grave where Trevor Chute had laid him? Was that grave not deep enough to hide him, that his spiritual essence--if essence it is--comes here? It was a dark and sorrowful Christmas Eve at Carnaby Court; guests who came to be gay, and to rejoice in the festivities of the joyous season, departed in quick succession. Jerry Vane never quite recovered the death of Ida or the manner of it, and some time elapsed before the gallant heart of Trevor Chute got the better of the shock of that night; but he could never forget the expression of the dead eyes that seemed to have looked again into his!