"We rose in alarm, but instantly sank again on our seats; and at that moment a peculiar and horrible sensation came over me. Sacre! methinks I feel it yet. I looked upon my companions of the carousal, but read in their faces an expression that yielded me anything but comfort. Three had dropped their glasses, and reclined upon their chairs, with open mouths and fixed eyes, which gleamed with the vacant wildness of insanity. The Chevalier de Vivancourt sank prostrate on the floor, while Chataigneur, who seemed also about to sink, turned and stared with a powerless aspect of rage and alarm at Donna Elvira. "Virginia had sunk upon her knees and hid her face in the skirt of her torn dress; but her mother stood erect, and, with her arms outstretched towards us, shrieked in a frightful voice between a moan and a yell, while a murderous rage, alike fiendish and terrible, caused her tall form to tremble, her proud nostrils to dilate, and her large dark eyes to gleam like those of a rattlesnake. "'At last we have avenged ourselves! Perros y ladrones! Frenchmen, dogs, and murderers, let me scream into your dying ears, that we are Castilian women, and have avenged our wrongs! I have lost my brave husband and his noble sons--by numbers you destroyed them, and side by side they fell on the palace threshold of the kings of Castile. Oh, bloodhounds--worse than devils in the form of men, ye murdered them, and now--my daughter (her voice became choked), my innocent little daughter--but we are revenged--revenged--revenged! Oh, Santa Maria, Virgin, y Madre de Jesu! let us be forgiven--but, fiends, the sure, cold hands of death are upon you--you are dying, for the wine you have drunk is poisoned!' "Mon Dieu!" said St. Florian, pausing while the perspiration almost suffused his forehead, "still the screech-owl voice of that detestable hag seems to ring in my tingling ears! "Inspired by terror and rage, I made an effort to spring up, to draw my sabre, to run her through the heart; but the moment my hand touched the hilt, a deadly numbness crept over me; I staggered backward, and while sleep and despair came over my soul, sank prone and insensible on the corpses of my comrades!" St. Florian paused again for an instant, for he really seemed considerably excited by the recollection of the adventure. "Parbleu! 'twas a most unpleasant denouement--a devil of a winding-up. Next morning I found my self lying prostrate on the chilly floor of the Church of the Conception, which, with many others, had been converted into a temporary hospital for the sick and wounded. I was sick for seventeen days, and my head ached as if it had been crushed in a vice; while my miserable throat was skinned by the stomach pump and other engines of the medical science, which the staff surgeon had kept at work on me, as they afterwards said, for two consecutive hours.