orrified circle about the thing that looked like a shadow, and yet
was not a shadow, but some horrible nightmare that made us gasp and
shudder till the moon came suddenly out, and we saw that what we
feared and shrank from were the bodies of Juliet and Orrin, he lying
with face upturned and arms thrown out, and she with her head pillowed
on his breast as if cast there in her last faint moment of
consciousness. They were both dead, having fallen through the planks
of the scaffolding, as was shown by the fatal gap open to the
moonlight above our heads. Dead! dead! and though no man there knew
how, the terror of their doom and the retribution it seemed to bespeak
went home to our hearts, and we bowed our heads with a simultaneous
cry of terror, which in that first moment was too overwhelming even
for grief.

The Colonel was nowhere to be seen, and after the first few minutes of
benumbing horror, we tried to call aloud his name. But the cries died
in our throat, and presently one amongst us withdrew into the house to
search, and then another and another, till I was left alone in awful
attendance upon the dead. Then I began to realize my own anguish, and
with some last fragment of secret jealousy--or was it from some other
less definite but equally imperative feeling?--was about to stoop
forward and lift her head from a pillow that I somehow felt defiled
it, when a quick hand drew me aside, and looking up, I saw Ralph
standing at my back. He did not speak, and his figure looked ghostly
in the moonlight, but his hand was pointing toward the house, and when
I moved to follow him, he led the way into the hollow entrance and up
the stairway till we came to the upper story where he stopped, and
motioned me toward a door opening into one of the rooms.

There were several of our number already standing there, so I did not
hesitate to approach, and as I went the darkness in which I had
hitherto moved disappeared before the broad band of moonlight shining
into the room before us, and I saw, darkly silhouetted against a
shining background, the crouching figure of the Colonel, staring with
hollow eyes and maddened mien out of the unfinished window through
which in all probability the devoted couple had stepped to their
destruction.

"Can you make him speak?" asked one. "He does not seem to heed us,
though we have shouted to him and even shook his arm."

"I shall not try," said I. "Horror like this should be respected." And
going s