ed, and presently he went
on--

"What is your opinion, sir?"

"It is over--she is dead!"

Then, without speaking another word, he sat upon a large stone, with his
forehead resting upon his hand and his elbow on his knee, his eyes
motionless, as still as a statue.

I sat near the fire, watching the flames rising to the vaulted roof of
the cave, and casting lurid reflections upon the rigid features of the
corpse.

We had sat there an hour as motionless as statues, each deep in thought,
when, suddenly lifting his head, the baron said--

"Sir, all this utterly confounds me. Here is my mother--for twenty-six
years I thought I knew her--and now an abyss of horrible mysteries opens
before me. You are a doctor; tell me, did you ever know anything so
dreadful?"

"Monseigneur," I replied, "the Count of Nideck is afflicted with a
complaint strikingly similar to that from which your mother appears to
have suffered. If you feel enough confidence in me to communicate to me
the facts which you have yourself observed, I will gladly tell you what I
know myself; for perhaps this exchange of our experiences might supply me
with the means to save my patient."

"Willingly, sir," he replied, and without any further prelude he informed
me that the Baroness de Bluderich, a member of one of the noblest
families in Saxony, took, every year towards autumn, a journey into
Italy, with no attendant besides an old man-servant, who possessed her
entire confidence; that that man, being at the point of death, had
desired a private interview with the son of his old master, and that at
that last hour, prompted, no doubt, by the pangs of remorse, he had told
the young man that his mother's visit to Italy was only a pretence to
enable her to make, you observed, a certain excursion into the Black
Forest, the object of which was unknown to himself, but which must have
had something fearful in its character, since the baroness returned
always in a state of physical prostration, ragged, half dead, and that
weeks of rest alone could restore her after the hideous labours of those
few days.

This was the purport of the old servant's disclosures to the young baron,
who believed that in so doing he was only fulfilling his duty.

The son, anxious at any sacrifice to know the truth of this account, had,
that very year, ascertained it, first by following his mother to Baden,
and then by penetrating on her track into the gorges of the Black Forest.
The foo