"What! has my _fiance_ nothing to say?" jibed madame, with flashing eyes, green as a tigress. "Is he choked by a skein of thread? Felled by a thimble? Stabbed by a tailor's needle? Fie, fie! Ladislaus Schmolnitz, to let the coat fit you so well! To stand dumb as your own goose! Oh, cowardly little tailor!" Shrilly the scoffing denunciation rang out; stepping back a pace she pointed her finger in his face and laughed wildly; and the good company, suddenly catching the resistless drollery of the farce, burst into a long, convulsive, mocking peal of merciless laughter, till the room rang again, the glasses jingled, and the poor little tailor threw himself on his knees before the ferocious Nemesis and begged for mercy. But the good company pointed their fingers in the wretch's appalled face and hissed him down; and the air seemed alive with ten thousand serpents, and the room swam around with eyes of mockery and ire; and deafened, horror-stricken, and utterly routed, the poor little tailor fell forward on the carpet in a dead swoon. When he recovered his senses, the room was deserted, the lights were out, and one small, airy figure stood at a distant door with a taper in her hand and looking on the fallen hero. "Better, good Monsieur Schmolnitz?" mocked Madame Hesslein. He rose unsteadily, and held by the back of a chair. "Beast! traitress! you are my wife, are you?" hissed he, in a furious whisper. "I had my doubts of you all the while. But this shall ruin you." "Oh, no, my excellent tailor, I am above your puny attacks. So, now that we have squared accounts, I will bid you a long adieu." She bowed to the floor, rose, and gave him one long, fierce, taunting glance. He drew a pistol from his breast, took deliberate aim, and fired it full at her face, just as she closed the door. It missed her by a hair-breadth. She looked in again with a diabolical laugh, and vanished; and he, too, fled by the opposite door, just as the hotel servants rushed in to quell the tumult. CHAPTER XXXI. BRAND PLUCKED FROM THE BURNING. "Circles and circles of brightening light breaking over me; a faint, but delicious sense of comfort; a swift vanishing of the distorted phantoms which have left me here for dead--a kind and dear awakening. "What tender face is this that is bending over me? What soft bosom is this upon which my head is lying? "Have I bridged at last the chasm of mortality, and is this my fate in the immortal world? "I smile, if this be so, at the idle fears of those who prophesied for me a hell. This is Heaven! What seraph is this who is bearing me upon her bosom after my fight with the throes of death? How soft and cool her hand, which bands my brow! Her wings are folded close, and she will not fly away; her breath wafts my weary eyelids like the zephyr born at the gates of Paradise.