They have brought the two bruised bodies down into the village and they now lie side by side in the parlor where I last saw Juliet in the bloom and glow of life. The Colonel is still crouching where I left him. No one can make him speak and no one can make him move, and the terror which his terror has produced affects the whole community, not even the darkness of the night serving to lessen the wild excitement which drives men and women about the streets as if it were broad daylight, and makes of every house an open thorough-fare through which anybody who wishes can pass. I, who have followed every change and turn in this whole calamitous affair, am like one benumbed at this awful crisis. I too go and come through the streets, hear people say in shouts, in cries, with bitter tears and wild lamentations, "Juliet is dead!" "Orrin is dead!" and get no sense from the words. I have even been more than once to that spot where they lie in immovable beauty, and though I gaze and gaze upon them, I feel nothing--not even wonder. Only the remembrance of that rigid figure frozen into its place above the gulf where so much youth and so many high hopes fell, has power to move me. When amid the shadows which surround me I see _that_, I shudder and the groan rises slowly to my lips as if I too were looking down into a gulf from which hope and love would never again rise. * * * * * The Colonel is now in his father's house. He was induced to leave the place by Ralph Urphistone's little child. When the great man first felt the touch of those baby fingers upon his, he shuddered and half recoiled, but as the little one pulled him gently but persistently towards the stair, he gradually yielded to her persuasion, and followed till he had descended to the ground-floor and left the fatal house. I do not think any other power could have induced him to pass that blood-stained threshold. For he seems thoroughly broken down, and will, I fear, never be the same man that he was before this fearful tragedy took place before his eyes.