The bugles were still playing: the company were strolling about the garden, or sitting before the house. The sun had gone down behind thick murky clouds, and the country was lying in the grey dusk, when a parting gleam suddenly burst athwart the cloudy veil, and flooded every spot around, but above all the building, its galleries and pillars and wreaths of flowers, as it were with red blood. At this moment the parents of the bride and the other visitors saw a train of the most grotesque figures move toward the upper corridor. Roderick led the way as the scarlet old woman, and was followed by humpbacks, bulging paunches, cumbrous wigs, Scaramouches, Punches, shrivelled Pantaloons, curtsying women embankt by enormous hoops, and overcanopied with a yard of horsehair, powder, and pomatum, and by every disgusting shape that can be imagined, as if a nightmair had been unrolling her stores. They jumpt, and twirled, and tottered, and stumbled, and straddled, and strutted, and swaggered along the gallery, and then vanisht behind one of the doors. But few of the beholders had been able to laugh, so utterly were they astounded by the strange sight. Suddenly a piercing shriek burst from one of the rooms, and forth into the bloodred glow of the sunset rusht the pale bride, in a short white frock, about which wreaths of flowers were dangling, with her lovely bosom all naked, and her rich locks streaming through the air. As though mad, with rolling eyes and wrencht face, she darted along the gallery, and blinded by terrour could find neither door nor staircase; and immediately after dasht Emilius in chase of her, with the sparkling Turkish dagger in his high-uplifted hand. Now she was at the end of the passage ... she could go no further ... he reacht her. His maskt friends and the grey old woman were running after him. But in his fury he had already pierced her bosom, and cut across her white neck; her blood spouted forth into the radiance of the setting sun. The old woman had claspt her arms round him to tear him back; he struggled fiercely, hurled himself along with her over the railing, and they both fell almost lifeless at the feet of the relations who had been staring in dumb horrour at the bloody scene. Above, and in the court, or hurrying down the steps or along the galleries, were seen the hideous masks, standing or running about, in various clusters, like fiends of hell. Roderick took his dying friend in his arms. He had found him in his wife's room, playing with the dagger. She was almost drest when he entered. At the sight of the detested red bodice his memory had rekindled; the horrid vision of that night had risen up before his eyes; and gnashing his teeth he had darted after his trembling, flying bride, to avenge that murder and all those devilish doings. The old woman, ere she died, confest the crime that had been perpetrated; and the gladness and mirth of the whole house were suddenly changed into sorrow and lamentation and dismay.