The struggle was terrible; a look of vengeful despair sat on the beaded brow of one, and deep, dark, unmitigable hate gleamed in the strained eyeballs of the other. The assailed man chafed like a maimed lion in the hunter's toils, and his efforts bore that character of ruthless savageness which is the consequence of hopeless fear--of rayless despair. The other, in the proud consciousness of tried strength, dashed his dagger into the bosom of the clouded chaos that formed the atmosphere in which they fought, and, by the exertion of resistless bodily power, bore his victim back towards the verge of the parapet. _Too_ pale to seem human, like the animated statues of two contending gladiators, they rocked to and fro on its extremity. A momentary strife ensued, in which the muscles of each seemed cracking with the might of their exertions. For a single instant, the assailant seemed to give way, and the heart of his victim beat with a hope that intensity made an agony; but the relaxation was but the prelude to a more violent effort. Again they were upon the verge of the battlement--they balanced upon the edge--and then sank into the darkness. A wild, sardonic laugh, and a cry of agony that seemed to freeze the very elements and hush their destructive howl into silence, went up to heaven, succeeded by a dull, heavy sound that announced the departure of two souls to judgment. The next day the patrol discovered, beneath the postern that opened upon the castle fosse, two mangled bodies, quite dead. The one was the Prince Carlos, Regent of Spain, and the other the Count Carlo Zanotti. FOOTNOTE: [Footnote 1: I have liberally availed myself, in the above theory, of the hints of my talented friend, J. J. Woodward, contained in an epistolatory criticism on Bulwer's Zanoni, written to a mutual friend.] THE ORPHAN'S DEPARTURE. BY MARGARET FLOYD. (_See Plate._)