young lady living in a town, or a bustling neighborhood can possibly
imagine. This visit, and the new acquaintance it promised, had furnished
my day dream for many weeks.

"And how soon does he come?" I asked.

"Not till autumn. Not for two months, I dare say," he answered. "And I
am very glad now, dear, that you never knew Mademoiselle Rheinfeldt."

"And why?" I asked, both mortified and curious.

"Because the poor young lady is dead," he replied. "I quite forgot I had
not told you, but you were not in the room when I received the General's
letter this evening."

I was very much shocked. General Spielsdorf had mentioned in his first
letter, six or seven weeks before, that she was not so well as he would
wish her, but there was nothing to suggest the remotest suspicion
of danger.

"Here is the General's letter," he said, handing it to me. "I am afraid
he is in great affliction; the letter appears to me to have been written
very nearly in distraction."

We sat down on a rude bench, under a group of magnificent lime trees.
The sun was setting with all its melancholy splendor behind the sylvan
horizon, and the stream that flows beside our home, and passes under the
steep old bridge I have mentioned, wound through many a group of noble
trees, almost at our feet, reflecting in its current the fading crimson
of the sky. General Spielsdorf's letter was so extraordinary, so
vehement, and in some places so self-contradictory, that I read it twice
over--the second time aloud to my father--and was still unable to
account for it, except by supposing that grief had unsettled his mind.

It said "I have lost my darling daughter, for as such I loved her.
During the last days of dear Bertha's illness I was not able to write
to you.

"Before then I had no idea of her danger. I have lost her, and now learn
_all_, too late. She died in the peace of innocence, and in the glorious
hope of a blessed futurity. The fiend who betrayed our infatuated
hospitality has done it all. I thought I was receiving into my house
innocence, gaiety, a charming companion for my lost Bertha. Heavens!
what a fool have I been!

"I thank God my child died without a suspicion of the cause of her
sufferings. She is gone without so much as conjecturing the nature of
her illness, and the accursed passion of the agent of all this misery. I
devote my remaining days to tracking and extinguishing a monster. I am
told I may hope to accomplish my righteous and