The gloomy half-lighted chamber in which this scene took place, and where the dead girl lay, looking so sweetly placid in her coffin, was one of those, where, in conformity with the police regulations of Germany in general, the bodies of persons deceased are placed within twelve hours after death--there to await interment. In many places, more particularly at Frankfort, to guard against the chances of burial in cases of suspended animation, the fingers of the dead are placed in the loops of a bell-rope, attached to an alarm clock, which is fixed in the apartment of the attendant appointed to be on the watch. The least pulsation in the body would give the alarm, when medical aid would instantly be called in. Ernestine had a watcher in an adjoining room! but that worthy was found in the enjoyment of a profound slumber, and so had neither heard nor seen anything. This strange story found its way into the _Aix Gazette_ and the _Extra Blatt_. Some averred that Charlie Pierrepont, on discovering her body in the chamber of Death, had gone mad and had imagined the whole interview in the church; others, that it was really a case of suspended animation, and that she had recovered for a time, and actually kept her tryst; but the former idea was the predominant one. Certain it is that for many weeks after the event Charlie seemed to hover between life and death, sanity and insanity, at the Grand Monarque; and when he rejoined the Thuringianas before the walls of Paris, he had become so haggard, grey-haired, and old-looking, that his former comrades scarcely recognised him, so much had he undergone by a fever of the mind, rather than of the body. When these dreadful events were soothed by time, though not forgotten at Frankenburg, and when the summer flowers were blooming over Charlie's grave--a grave which he found under the guns of Mont Valerien--the young Graf Heinrich was married to his cousin Herminia by the Herr Pastor Von Puffenvörtz, in the church of Burtscheid, when, as if no sorrow had preceded the ceremony, all indeed went merrily as a 'marriage bell.' THE END. BILLING AND SONS, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD AND LONDON.