Meantime the marriage between Margaret Liebenheim and Maximilian was understood to be drawing near.  Yet one thing struck everybody with astonishment.  As far as the young people were concerned, nobody could doubt that all was arranged; for never was happiness more perfect than that which seemed to unite them.  Margaret was the impersonation of May-time and youthful rapture; even Maximilian in her presence seemed to forget his gloom, and the worm which gnawed at his heart was charmed asleep by the music of her voice, and the paradise of her smiles.  But, until the autumn came, Margaret’s grandfather had never ceased to frown upon this connection, and to support the pretensions of Ferdinand.  The dislike, indeed, seemed reciprocal between him and Maximilian.  Each avoided the other’s company and as to the old man, he went so far as to speak sneeringly of Maximilian.  Maximilian despised him too heartily to speak of him at all.  When he could not avoid meeting him, he treated him with a stern courtesy, which distressed Margaret as often as she witnessed it.  She felt that her grandfather had been the aggressor; and she felt also that he did injustice to the merits of her lover.  But she had a filial tenderness for the old man, as the father of her sainted mother, and on his own account, continually making more claims on her pity, as the decay of his memory, and a childish fretfulness growing upon him from day to day, marked his increasing imbecility.

Equally mysterious it seemed, that about this time Miss Liebenheim began to receive anonymous letters, written in the darkest and most menacing terms.  Some of them she showed to me.  I could not guess at their drift.  Evidently they glanced at Maximilian, and bade her beware of connection with him; and dreadful things were insinuated about him.  Could these letters be written by Ferdinand?  Written they were not, but could they be dictated by him?  Much I feared that they were; and the more so for one reason.

All at once, and most inexplicably, Margaret’s grandfather showed a total change of opinion in his views as to her marriage.  Instead of favoring Harrelstein’s pretensions, as he had hitherto done, he now threw the feeble weight of his encouragement into Maximilian’s scale; though, from the situation of all the parties, nobody attached any practical importance to the change in Mr. Liebenheim’s way of thinking.  Nobody?  Is that true?  No; one person did attach the greatest weight to the change—­poor, ruined Ferdinand.  He, so long as there was one person to take his part, so long as the grandfather of Margaret showed countenance to himself, had still felt his situation not utterly desperate.

Thus were things situated, when in November, all the leaves daily blowing off from the woods, and leaving bare the most secret haunts of the thickets, the body of the jailer was left exposed in the forest; but not, as I and my friend had conjectured, hanged.  No; he had died apparently by a more horrid death—­by that of crucifixion.  The tree, a remarkable one, bore upon a part of its trunk this brief but savage inscription:--“T.  H., jailer at -----; Crucified July 1, 1816.”