passed from room to room, but found no traces of Miss Liebenheim.  At length they ascended the stair, and in the very first room, a small closet, or boudoir, lay Margaret, with her dress soiled hideously with blood.  The first impression was that she also had been murdered; but, on a nearer approach, she appeared to be unwounded, and was manifestly alive.  Life had not departed, for her breath sent a haze over a mirror, but it was suspended, and she was laboring in some kind of fit.  The first act of the crowd was to carry her into the house of a friend on the opposite side of the street, by which time medical assistance had crowded to the spot.  Their attentions to Miss Liebenheim had naturally deranged the condition of things in the little room, but not before many people found time to remark that one of the murderers must have carried her with his bloody hands to the sofa on which she lay, for water had been sprinkled profusely over her face and throat, and water was even placed ready to her hand, when she might happen to recover, upon a low foot-stool by the side of the sofa.

On the following morning, Maximilian, who had been upon a hunting party in the forest, returned to the city, and immediately learned the news.  I did not see him for some hours after, but he then appeared to me thoroughly agitated, for the first time I had known him to be so.  In the evening another perplexing piece of intelligence transpired with regard to Miss Liebenheim, which at first afflicted every friend of that young lady.  It was that she had been seized with the pains of childbirth, and delivered of a son, who, however, being born prematurely, did not live many hours.  Scandal, however, was not allowed long to batten upon this imaginary triumph, for within two hours after the circulation of this first rumor, followed a second, authenticated, announcing that Maximilian had appeared with the confessor of the Liebenheim family, at the residence of the chief magistrate, and there produced satisfactory proofs of his marriage with Miss Liebenheim, which had been duly celebrated, though with great secrecy, nearly eight months before.  In our city, as in all the cities of our country, clandestine marriages, witnessed, perhaps, by two friends only of the parties, besides the officiating priest, are exceedingly common.  In the mere fact, therefore, taken separately, there was nothing to surprise us, but, taken in connection with the general position of the parties, it did surprise us all; nor could we conjecture the reason for a step apparently so needless.  For, that Maximilian could have thought it any point of prudence or necessity to secure the hand of Margaret Liebenheim by a private marriage, against the final opposition of her grandfather, nobody who knew the parties, who knew the perfect love which possessed Miss Liebenbeim, the growing imbecility of her grandfather, or the utter contempt with which Maximilian regarded him, could for a moment believe.  Altogether, the matter was one of profound mystery.