"Another circumstance very remarkable was noticed by the page. This person had been the confidential attendant of the late Duke, and he declared himself convinced, that the stiletto which Francesco had continued to grasp convulsively during his faint, was the same which he had seen lying by the body of his master on that fatal evening, and which had soon afterwards been unaccountably lost. "Not long after Francesco's flight, news came of the Italian Duchess. On the very day when the former should have been married, she had been delivered of a son, and soon after her accouchement had died. The Prince deplored her untimely fate, though the circumstances of the bridal-night had weighed so heavily on her, that her future life must, of necessity, have been unhappy. Nor were there wanting individuals malicious enough to raise against her evil rumours and suspicions. Her son never appeared here, but was educated in distant countries, under the Italian title of Count Victorin. "The Princess--I mean the sister-in-law of our Sovereign--being reduced to utter despair by these horrid events following like links of a chain so closely on one another, determined on devoting the rest of her life to the cloister. She is, as you already know, Abbess of the Cistertian Convent at Kreuzberg. "But, between these adventures which happened in our court, there has lately been traced a wonderful, and almost supernatural coincidence, with others which occurred very lately at the castle of the Baron von F----, in the Thuringian mountains, and by which his house was thrown precisely into the same state of distraction and misery under which ours had suffered. You must know that the Abbess, who had been moved with the distress of a poor woman with a child in her arms, who came to her from a pilgrimage to the Convent of the Lime-Tree"-- Here the entrance of a visitor put an end to the physician's narrative; and hastily taking my leave, I succeeded tolerably well in concealing the tempest of emotions which now raged within me. Scarcely a doubt remained on my mind that Francesco had been my father. He had murdered the Duke with the identical stiletto with which, in self-defence, I had afterwards killed Hermogen! Here, then, was the origin of that hereditary guilt, of which the darkening clouds hung like a curse upon my existence, and which it should have been my earnest endeavour to expiate, by a life of voluntary suffering, of penance, and exemplary piety. Hence, therefore, I resolved instantly to follow the Prior's injunctions, and betake myself to Italy; thus breaking out at once from that dangerous circle into which I had been seduced by the malicious powers of darkness.