Three hours later the party returned, minus Herbert. They said he had got separated from them in some way, and they quite thought he had come back. Although a sense of something being wrong overcame me for the moment, I tried to think that it was simply nervousness. Of course, the gentlemen at once hurried back to the moor, and when they came again they brought my lover mangled and shattered, and, as it seemed then, in the agony of death. Oh, my God! how awful it was! I thought I should have gone raving mad. It appears that Herbert had been found in a hollow, whither he had fallen by the breaking away of the snow under his feet. In his fall he had not only fractured an arm and some of his ribs, but his gun had gone off full in his face, and, besides disfiguring him frightfully, had destroyed both his eyes. It can be imagined what a terrible shock it was to the household, and how the joy and mirth were turned to lamentations and moaning. Doctors were procured, but they pronounced the sufferer’s condition as critical; they left us no room to hope that the sight would be restored under any circumstances. Ah, what a fearful dark Christmas that became to me! I think in my agony of mind I cursed my fate, my God; and how I hated the house, and shuddered as I thought of the horrible room where my beloved had seen the strange apparition of the White Raven. Up to a short time previously, it would have been difficult to have found a girl more sceptical than I was about anything that savoured of superstition; but now I was filled with a strange dread, and feared my own shadow. When I saw old Jack for the first time after the accident, he said to me: ‘Is it true, miss, that Meester Wilton’s been asleeping in the haunted room?’ ‘Yes, Jack; it is,’ I answered, in heartbroken tones. ‘Then, maybe, he’s seen the White Raven?’ ‘He has,’ I replied; whereupon I thought the old man would have fallen down in a fit, so scared did he seem; and he mumbled out: ‘God bless us and preserve us all! I wouldn’t sleep in that room, miss, not if Queen Victoriey was to give me her golden crown. That there room, miss, ought to be shut up, and no one ever allowed to go anigh it agen.’