'And _spoken_ with you?' said the Count, in an excited tone. 'Oh, if it should be that she still lives!' 'Lives!--great Heaven! Herr Graf--she was here with me, and I gave her a French cross with the bullet that wounded me.' 'He raves!' said the Baron Grunthal, with anger in his tone. 'She is there--in that room off the church.' 'In that room sure enough. It is the Dead Chamber,' said the Count, approaching the door. 'She fled there for concealment on hearing your approach.' 'Man,' said the old Count, pausing, 'are you not mad to tell me that she is there now, and yet was here but a minute ago?' 'As I have Heaven to answer to--she was!' 'Follow me, then.' On entering the room, Charlie Pierrepont reeled, and would have fallen had not Heinrich supported him. We scarcely know how to write of the episode that follows, and can but tell the tale as it was told by those who were cognisant of it. In a purple velvet coffin, mounted with silver, and supported on trestles, the lid being open, lay Ernestine, dressed as we have described her--dead, stone-dead, cold and pale as marble, her lips a pale blue streak, her long eyelashes closed for ever. Dead, beyond a doubt, was the girl he had clasped in his arms as a living being, but a few minutes before living and full of volition and life, love and energy; the lips he had kissed closed thus for ever; the hands he had caressed, snow-white now, disposed upon her bosom, the upper one holding the cross he had given her! 'Dead! What miracle of heaven; what magic of hell is here!' he exclaimed, as he staggered to the side of the coffin, pale as the girl who lay in it, the bead-like drops oozing from his temples as he grasped the locks above them. 'Speak! oh, speak, Heinrich!' How terribly now came back to memory some of the strange things Ernestine had said to him, and more than all, those dying words of the French captain in the Chateau de Colombey, which sounded like something between a prophecy and a curse! 'Compose yourself, Carl,' said Heinrich, full of pity. 'My letter to her--written after she was dead,' said Charles, in a voice like a whisper--'she--she----' 'I placed it in her coffin ere she was brought here from the Schloss,' said Heinrich, who was now weeping freely; 'it is there now--and heavens, father! she _has_ round her neck the cross of which Carl spoke.' There are many things but imperfectly known in 'our philosophy,' and certainly this seemed one of them. 'She died talking of you--not raving--the poor angel,' said the old Count, as he bent fondly over the coffined girl, 'but smiling sweetly, and saying earnestly, again and, again, that she would meet you at Burtscheid.' * * * * *