continued, 'by keeping your mistress waiting here
at this time of night?'

"' My orders are not to open the gate,'
replied the man.

"' Do you know who this lady is?'

"' I know perfectly,' the porter answered.
'But what can I do?'

"' Do! why open the gate instantly,' cried the
lieutenant.

"' I dare not do it,' the man replied.

"'Hans Tramer,' said the countess, speaking
for the first time, ' it is I who ask you to let me
in.' I must mention," continued Madame Stortzer,
"that the countess was a favourite with all her
dependents, having won upon them by her gentle
and gracious ways. 'Hans,' she went on, 'I
will be responsible for the consequences. You
shall not lose your place.' The man hesitated.

"' Hans,' said the Countess Constantia, ' when
your wife was at the worst of the fever which is
still upon her, I did not hesitate to come and
see her at the risk of my life.'

"The man's head disappeared at the turret
window, and soon the sound of unfastening bolts
and bars was heard behind the great doors.

"The lieutenant took his leave at the door, as
his custom was, and the countess bade him good
night, and went into the house. Cautiously and
on tiptoe she approached the room in which her
husband was lying, for she hoped that he might
still be asleep in spite of the noise which had
been made at the gate, and she was very willing
to defer all explanation till the morrow. There
was no sound in the room, and the lady
approached the bed congratulating herself that the
count was still asleep. As she drew nearer,
something strange about her husband's position
struck her, and looking at him more closely she
observed that his eyes were partly open.

"In another moment the castle was ringing
with the countess's shrieks, and the whole house-
hold rushed to the apartment in which the count
lay—dead."

Madame Stortzer paused for a moment, but I
did not interrupt her, although I was breathless
to hear the rest. Presently she went on:

"It was at first thought that the count had
died a natural death, but on examination of the
body it was found that there were evident signs
of suffocation. There were marks on the throat,
and evidence of heavy pressure on the chest,
which left little doubt that violence had been
used, though every effort had been made to
conceal the signs of it. Of course a most searching
inquiry took place, with a view to the discovery
of the murderer, but it was wholly unavailing.
The count had retired to bed at an unusually
early hour, and none of the servants had heard
any noise in the house, or seen any strange
person about the premises. Hans Tramer, the
porter, was of course more specially examined,
in order that it might be ascertained whether any
one had, in the course of the evening, passed
through the gate, and it then came out that for
some time the porter had left the lodge in charge
of his little boy, while he went in to look after his
wife, who was still suffering from the remains of
a severe attack of fever. The man was devotedly
attached to his wife, and had in this respect
unquestionably neglected his duty. As to the boy's
evidence, little could be made of that. He said,
indeed, that he had seen a man muffled up in a
cloak pass into the castle, but that he took no
notice of this, as he felt sure at the time that it
was Lieutenant Bergfeldt, to whom he knew that
the entrée of the castle was accorded at all hours.
The child stuck to this statement, even in the
teeth of the lieutenant's own contradiction of the
story; but as by his own account he had been
asleep part of the time when he ought to have
been watching the gate, no importance was
attached to his evidence. The lieutenant's word,
of course, went for more than that of the porter's
little son. I must mention, by-the-by, that no
one was more energetic than Lieutenant
Bergfeldt in trying to find out the real criminal, but
neither his efforts nor any one else's were in this
respect successful.

"I will not dwell," Madame Stortzer continued,
"on the grief and self-reproach of the countess.
Her attachment to her husband had been sincere,
and the thought that she had been disobeying
his injunctions at the very moment of his death,
was almost worse to bear than even the death
itself, with all its attendant horrors. For some
time she refused to see any one, and remained
altogether shut up in her rooms, not even going
out for air and exercise. Lieutenant Bergfeldt,
indeed, she was obliged to communicate with
from time to time, as he it was who was foremost
in pursuing all those investigations which were
necessitated by the peculiar circumstances of the
count's death . Old General Bremner, too, it was
necessary that she should see occasionally, as he
had been appointed by the late count to administer
his affairs. The countess was left well off, everything,
with the exception of a few trifling legacies,
being bequeathed to her by the will of her
late husband.

" I have said that the widow was brought, from
time to time, in contact with Lieutenant
Bergfeldt. It was impossible to imagine anything
more perfect than the mixture of respect and
sympathy with which this young officer approached
the bereaved lady. For some time no allusion
was made between them to her affliction, and
their intercourse was confined almost entirely to
matters of business, but after a while, and in a
manner insensibly, the lieutenant would allow
himself to say some sympathetic word, to make
some mention of his respect for the deceased
count, to allude to the intimacy which had
existed between them. By degrees, too, and
after a long interval, he would allow, as if
accidentally, some expression to escape him
indicative of the intense feeling of commiseration
with which he was penetrated as he looked on
and saw what were the sufferings of the young
widow— feeling all the time so helpless to relieve
those sufferings in any way whatever. But why