VL] THE RED BARON. 323

 

enter; her worst paroxysms seemed toreturn. _ Perhaps
to her disordered brain there recurred the awful scene
which had taken place in that room, and the remem-
brance of my previous entry excited her diseased
imagination and drove her to fury. Anyhow, she
leaped from the ground and with a wild yell rushed
up the front staircase.

‘We followed as fast as we could, but she was
before us all the way, and when she reached the stair-
case on which were her rooms, instead of entering
them, she rushed to one of the large open embrasures
of the castle wall, turned round upon us for an instant,
waved her hand with a scornful, mocking laugh, and
springing through the embrasure was in another instant
dashed in pieces upon the pavement a hundred feet
below. My life virtually ended at that moment.

‘T can tell you no more of my own recollection ; but
as you will not be satisfied without knowing what
really became of me, I will relate what I now know
to have happened. I did not appear the next morn-
ing. They knocked at my door for some time, then
opened it, and found the room empty. They called
me all over the house without obtaining any answer,
and at last, on searching the rooms which my lost
Christina had occupied, they found me hanging from
an iron bar which ran across the top of one of the
windows, to which I had made fast an old shawl of
my darling’s and had contrived to arrange it in a slip
knot round my neck in such a manner as to need no
other executioner. This was the end of my life—if

not of my troubles. Of course I have had to haunt
ya