His eye turned to the wall, where the signs of his former grandeur hung, and he waved his hand, as if to dismiss the witness of a grief which he strove to conquer. “I do not pity him; ’tis but one man the less. Nor do I pity myself; what have I to lose? But my daughter,--my unfortunate daughter! I shall be the victim of this infernal plot; and what is to become of her, if her father is taken from her?” He turned quickly to Ordener. “How did he die? Where did you see him?” “I saw him at the Spladgest. No one knows whether he died by suicide or by the hand of an assassin.” “That is now all-important. If he was murdered, I know who dealt the blow. Then all is lost. He bore proofs of the conspiracy against me. Those proofs might have saved me and ruined them! Unhappy Ethel!” “My lord Count,” said Ordener, bowing, “to-morrow I will tell you whether he was murdered.” Schumacker, without answering, cast on Ordener, as he left the room, a look of quiet despair more terrible than the calm of death. Ordener found himself in the prisoner’s empty antechamber, not knowing which way to turn. Night was far advanced and the room was dark. He opened a door at haphazard and entered a vast corridor lighted only by the moon, which moved rapidly through pale clouds. Its misty beams fell now and again upon the long, narrow glass windows, and painted on the opposite wall what seemed a procession of ghosts, appearing and disappearing simultaneously in the depths of the passage. The young man slowly crossed himself, and walked toward a light which shone faintly at the end of the corridor. A door stood ajar; a young girl knelt in a Gothic oratory, at the foot of a bare altar, reciting in low tones litanies to the Virgin,--simple and sublime aspirations, in which the soul that rises toward the Mother of Seven Sorrows asks nothing but her prayers. The young girl was dressed in black crape and white gauze, as if to show at a glance that her days had hitherto been passed in grief and innocence. Even in this modest attitude she bore the impress of a strange nature. Her eyes and her long hair were black (a very rare beauty in the North); her eyes, raised to heaven, seemed kindled with rapture rather than dimmed by meditation. She seemed a virgin from the shores of Cyprus or the banks of the Tiber, clad in the fanciful disguise of one of Ossian’s characters and prostrate before the wooden cross and stone altar of Christ Jesus. Ordener started and almost fell, for he recognized the devotee. She was praying for her father, for the mighty who had fallen, for the old and desolate prisoner; and she recited aloud the psalm of the deliverance out of Egypt. She prayed for another as well, but Ordener did not hear his name. He did not hear it, for she did not utter it; she merely recited the canticle of the Sulamite, the bride who awaits her bridegroom and the return of her beloved.