The grave was then about to be filled up; the noise of the earth, in falling, resounded on the coffin, and Henri shuddered. The crowd gradually dispersed; Guillaume and Isabelle alone remained beside the tomb; Henri approached it, and Isabelle observing him, with a forced smile, said, "Did you know her? I have seen you follow the funeral train with apparent interest, and now I behold you in tears; are you a relation, friend, or only even a native of the same place?" Henri listened to these questions with great surprise; "I scarcely understand you," he at length replied; "I am merely a traveller; but the deceased was, doubtless, _your_ friend?"--"Yes, my best, my dearest friend; yet our friendship was doomed to be of very short continuance. I was not at all acquainted with her until, about three months ago, she came to reside with my father, who is a physician, and to whose care her relations, when aware of her forlorn state, confided her." "Her relations," remarked Henri, "did not seem to be much affected; they appeared, indeed, quite resigned to their loss." "Her relations!" replied Isabelle, "she had none here; she was a stranger, and my father attended as chief mourner; he lamented her loss, but Marie was not his daughter, although I _myself_ loved her as a sister." "Marie!" she was called Marie! but what was her family-name? Often shall I think of her unhappy destiny. "Marie was only a name that she adopted, and we called her, because she could never bear to hear her own." "Isabelle," said she to me, almost at our first meeting, "never name me as he who has destroyed me named me; never, I entreat you, call me _dear Louise_." "Louise!" exclaimed Henri, growing pale as death; "Louise!" "Yes, Louise Courtin, of Verny!" No sooner had Isabelle uttered these words, than she beheld the young traveller fall senseless beside the grave, feebly repeating the name of Louise. Isabelle, in alarm, called her brother to her assistance; they raised up the stranger, who opened his eyes for a moment, and again muttered the same words. "Gracious Providence!" exclaimed the affrighted girl, "it is--it must be--Henri!" The youth made an effort, and cried out, in a frantic manner: "Yes! Henri, the murderer of his beloved; the assassin of Louise!" He then again fell down exhausted, and to all appearance dead. Guillaume had him conveyed to his father's, where every assistance that skill could devise, was tendered him; but he only recovered his recollection sufficiently to learn from Isabelle, that a person named Louis had brought positive intelligence to Verny, that Henri had espoused his master's daughter at Lyons; that her father himself had made him acquainted with the circumstance, and that he had seen the newly married couple in all the raptures of connubial happiness. It was impossible to discredit this news, which was a death-blow to the sensitive Louise.