For the door had opened, the footsteps were in the room, and Geraldine thought she recognised her sister’s maidenly tread. But why did Julia not speak, why this intolerable silence? Geraldine, peer as hard as she might, could make out nothing in the darkness. The footsteps seemed to fumble in their direction, but came always nearer to the bed, in which poor Geraldine lay more dead than alive. Oh, why did Julia not speak, just to reassure her? “Julia!” sobbed Geraldine. “Julia!” The footsteps seemed to fumble about the floor with an indecision maddening to Geraldine’s distraught nerves. But at last they came beside the bed--and there they stood! In the awful silence Geraldine could hear her heart beating like a hammer on a bell. “Oh!” the poor girl screamed. “What is it, Julia? Why don’t you speak?” But never a sound nor a word gave back the livid silence, never a sigh nor a breath, though Julia must be standing within a yard of the bed. “Oh, she is only trying to frighten me, the beast!” poor Geraldine thought; and, unable for another second to bear the cruel silence, she timidly stretched out a hand to touch her sister--when, to her infinite relief, her fingers touched the white rabbit fur with which Julia’s dressing-gown was delicately trimmed. “You beast, Julia!” she sobbed and laughed. Never a word, however, came from the still shape. Geraldine, impatient of the continuation of a joke which seemed to her in the worst of taste, raised her hand from the fur, that she might touch her sister’s face; but her fingers had risen no further than Julia’s throat when they touched something wet and warm, and with a scream of indescribable terror Geraldine fainted away. When Mr. Biggot-Baggot admitted himself into the house early the next morning, his eyes were assailed by a dreadful sight. At the foot of the stairs was a pool of blood, from which, in a loathsome trail, drops of blood wound up the stairway. Mr. Biggot-Baggot, fearful lest something out-of-the-way had happened to his beloved daughters, rushed frantically up the stairs. The trail of blood led to his daughters’ room; and there, in the doorway, the poor gentleman stood appalled, so foul was the sight that met his eyes. His beloved Geraldine lay on the bed, her hair snow-white, her lips raving with the shrill fancies of a maniac. While on the floor beside the bed lay stretched, in a pool of blood, his beloved Julia, her head half-severed from her trunk.