"It was the face of a child that was looking at me out of that stone, marked with the heartrending anguish of the agony of death. I could see drops of blood welling from the breast; but the rest of the form of the body seemed to flow vaguely into indistinctness, as if a stream of water were carrying it away. It was with a hard struggle that I overcame the horror which well-nigh overmastered me. I could not bring myself to utter a word. We left that terrible, mysterious place in silence. Not till I had walked about in the park and the lawns for some time could I overcome the inexplicable feeling which had so annulled my enjoyment of that little earthly paradise. From many things which I gathered from the detached utterances of the old man, I was led to conclude that the crazy being who had thrust herself into such intimate relations with the last proprietor of the place (in other respects a large-hearted and cultivated man) had worked upon him by promising him, through the exercise of her accursed arts, the fulfilment of his dearest wishes--unfailing and everlasting happiness in love--and so led him on to unutterable crime." "This is an affair for Cyprian," Ottmar said. "He would be as delighted over the bleeding baby in the marble, and in the old Castellan, as we." "Well," Theodore went on to say, "although all this affair may be traceable to foolish fancies--although it may be nothing but a fable kept up by the people--still, if that strangely-veined slab of marble is capable, even under the influence of a lively imagination, of showing the lineaments of a bleeding baby when looked at closely and carefully, something uncanny must have happened, or the faithful old servant could not have felt his master's guilt so deeply in his heart, nor would that strange stone give such a terrible evidence of it."