I could not wait for the water; I was irresistibly impelled to hasten back. Like a hunted stag I sprang up the side of the ravine, and bounded over the plateau to the ruin. All was over. Upon the very spot where I had parted from him, where I had last pressed his hand, he had shot himself. The smoke of the powder was still floating in the excavation. The pistol lay beside him; his head had fallen sideways against the wall. He breathed no more--he was quite dead. The Wild Zehren knew where a bullet must strike if the wound was to be mortal. CHAPTER XXI. I was still sitting, stupefied and incapable of reflection, by the dead man, when the first rays of the sun, which rose with tremulous lustre over the sea, fell upon his pallid face. A shudder ran through me. I arose and stood trembling in every limb. Then I ran, as fast as my tottering feet would bear me, along the path that descended from the ruin to the beech-wood. I could not now say what my real intention was. Did I simply wish to flee from this place of terror, from the presence of the corpse whose glazed eyes were fixed upon the rising sun? Did I wish to get assistance? Did I design to carry out alone the plan of escape I had formed for both, and thus save myself? I do not now know. I reached the park and the tarn, the water of which looked blackly through the yellow leaves that yesterday's storm had swept from the trees. In this water had drowned herself the wife of the man who had borne her from her far-off home over her brother's corpse, and who was now lying dead in the ruins of the castle of his forefathers. Their daughter had thrown herself into the arms of a profligate, after deceiving her father, and playing a shameful game with me. This all came at once into my mind like a hideous picture seen in the black mirror of the tarn. As if some pitiless god had rent away the veil from the pandemonium which to my blinded eyes had seemed a paradise, I saw at a glance the two last months of my life, and what they really were. I felt a nameless horror, less, I think, of myself, than of a world where such things had been, where such things could be. If it be true that nearly every man at some time in his life is led or driven by malignant demons to the verge of madness, this moment had come for me. I felt an almost irresistible impulse to throw myself into the black water which legend represented to be of unfathomable depth. I do not know what I might have done, had I not at this moment heard the voices of men who were coming down the path that led from the park. The instinct of self-preservation, which is not easily extinguished in a youth of nineteen, suddenly awaked within me. I would not fall into the hands of those whom I had been since the previous evening making such prodigious exertions to escape. In a bound I sprang up the bank that surrounded the tarn, leapt down on the other side, and then lay still,