Ernestine had a watcher in an adjoining room! but that worthy was found in the enjoyment of a profound slumber, and so had neither heard nor seen anything.
This strange story found its way into the Aix Gazette and the Extra Blatt.
Some averred that Charlie Pierrepont, on discovering her body in the chamber of Death, had gone mad and had imagined the whole interview in the church; others, that it was really a case of suspended animation, and that she had recovered for a time, and actually kept her tryst; but the former idea was the predominant one.
Certain it is that for many weeks after the event Charlie seemed to hover between life and death, sanity and insanity, at the Grand Monarque; and when he rejoined the Thuringianas before the walls of Paris, he had become so haggard, grey-haired, and old-looking, that his former comrades scarcely recognised him, so much had he undergone by a fever of the mind, rather than of the body.
When these dreadful events were soothed by time, though not forgotten at Frankenburg, and when the summer flowers were blooming over Charlie's grave—a grave which he found under the guns of Mont Valerien—the young Graf Heinrich was married to his cousin Herminia by the Herr Pastor Von Puffenvörtz, in the church of Burtscheid, when, as if no sorrow had preceded the ceremony, all indeed went merrily as a 'marriage bell.'
THE END.
BILLING AND SONS, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD AND LONDON.