Alas! poor Charlie! Will you speak again to finish that sentence and tell what you wish? For suddenly the mill wheel has turned round with a tremendous crash, and the brave young soldier has been hurled down! And Marguerite, what of her? With one agonized cry she rushed to the door intending to run outside to see if anything could be done for Charlie, when she came face to face with Jacques Gaultier! In an instant it all flashed on her that he must have wrought this terrible work, and, overcome by grief and horror, she sank down in a deadly faint. Bad man as he was, Jacques was really overcome at the consequences of his act, for he thought he had also killed Marguerite. He called loudly to her Father, who came up hurriedly. He was also seriously alarmed when his gaze rested on his child lying like one dead on the floor. Between them they carried her downstairs and laid her on her bed. They applied such restoratives as suggested themselves, but as everything was for sometime quite unavailing, a more miserable pair it would have been difficult to discover. Hirzel now came in. He was running upstairs to the granary when his Father called him in to see if he could do anything for his poor sister. "A pretty night's work this," he said, when he came into the room and saw his sister lying there. At this moment she opened her eyes, and he went close to her and raised her in his arms. With an expression of deep thankfulness, Marguerite's first words were to send that murderer, Jacques Gaultier, away out of her sight. Hirzel ordered him to leave the room, with more fierceness in his tone than anyone had heard there before. "Oh! Hirzel, what shall I do without Charlie? Stay with me, only you, and I will tell you all." Hearing this her Father left the room, and Hirzel bent down and whispered to her--- "Charlie is alive and well. He told me to tell you this himself." "Oh! Hirzel, you are deceiving me. How could he be alive after such a dreadful fall? It was terrible." Here Marguerite's fortitude gave way, and she indulged in a flood of tears, while Hirzel looked at her with the masculine helplessness usual on such occasions, and indeed it seemed to cost the fine tender-hearted fellow an effort to keep from joining in them too. At last he said, "Well Marguerite, if you don't stop, I'll go off, and tell Charlie you only cried after you heard he was alive and well." "Ah! Hirzel, is that not the way with our sex. Sometimes, to cry over the best and happiest times while the worst is bravely borne?" Hirzel then told Marguerite how he had met Charlie just outside at the foot of the lane, considerably bruised and knocked about, though without any internal injuries. How he escaped was nothing short of a miracle, one of those things which occasionally happen, perhaps, to show what can be done when there is the will to do it.