316 WHISPERS FROM FAIRYLAND. [vI.

 

tina—my lovely, my darling one— upon the floor,
supporting a man’s head and shoulders in her lap,
and wailing over him like a mother over the child
of her love. Frantically I rushed forward, and per-
ceived that my daughter held in her arms the lifeless
body of the Englander.

‘Rage and astonishment filled my heart. How had
he been slain? Who had been the savage combatants
the traces of whose recent fray were so plainly per-
ceptible around me? Had treason been at work, or
had any open enemy stormed the castle and
slaughtered my guest in my absence? Dead enough
he was in all conscience, with a gaping wound in his
breast enough to have let out half a dozen lives if he
had happened to have them. My chief thought was
for my daughter. I called to her. She answered
but by an incoherent moan.

‘I threw myself upon the ground by her side. I
spoke to her in my tenderest and softest voice, and
applied to her all the most affectionate epithets by
which I had been used to address her since the days
of her earliest childhood. All was in vain. She shrank
from my caresses with a shuddering glance of fear,
and remained deaf to all my entreaties that she would
speak and tell us whence this dreadful calamity had
befallen us. Alas! it was but too plain that the
catastrophe was greater than the loss of the Englander,
though for that I should have grieved sincerely. The
light of reason had for ever been extinguished in my
beloved daughter, and she would never more know
the father who so adored her, and whose sole hope
in life she had been.