When Blanche reached the summer-house, it was closed and untenanted; but scarcely had she entered and cast open the blinds of one window toward the road, before a hard horse-tramp was heard coming up at full gallop, and in an instant George Delawarr pulled up his panting charger in the lane, leaped to the ground, swung himself up into the branches of the great oak-tree, and climbing rapidly along its gnarled limbs, sprang down on the other side, rushed into the building, and cast himself at his mistress' feet. Agnes was entering the far end of the elm-tree walk as he sprang down into the little coplanade, but he was too dreadfully preoccupied with hope and anguish, and almost despair, to observe any thing around him. But she saw him, and fearful that she should be too late to arrest what she supposed to be the lovers' flight, she ran like the wind. She neared the doorway--loud voices reached her ears, but whether in anger, or in supplication, or in sorrow, she could not distinguish. Then came a sound that rooted her to the ground on which her flying foot was planted, in mute terror. The round ringing report of a pistol-shot! and ere its echo had begun to die away, another! No shriek, no wail, no word succeeded--all was as silent as the grave. Then terror gave her courage, and she rushed madly forward a few steps, then stood on the threshold horror-stricken. Both those young souls, but a few days before so happy, so beloved, and so loving, had taken their flight--whither? Both lay there dead, as they had fallen, but unconvulsed, and graceful even in death. Neither had groaned or struggled, but as they had fallen, so they lay, a few feet asunder--her heart and his brain pierced by the deadly bullets, sped with the accuracy of his never-erring aim. While she stood gazing, in the very stupor of dread, scarce conscious yet of what had fallen out, a deep voice smote her ear. "Base, base girl, this is all your doing!" Then, as if wakening from a trance, she uttered a long, piercing shriek, darted into the pavilion between the gory corpses, and flung herself headlong out of the open window into the pool beneath. But she was not fated so to die. A strong hand dragged her out--the hand of St. George, who, learning that his friend had ridden forth toward Ditton, had followed him, and arrived too late by scarce a minute. From that day forth Agnes Fitz-Henry was a dull, melancholy maniac. Never one gleam of momentary light dispersed the shadows of her insane horror--never one smile crossed her lip, one pleasant thought relieved her life-long sorrow. Thus lived she; and when death at length came to restore her spirit's light, she died, and made no sign. Allan Fitz-Henry _lived_--a moody misanthropic man, shunning all men, and shunned of all. In truth, the saddest and most wretched of the sons of men. How that catastrophe fell out none ever knew, and it were useless to conjecture.