Page:Foreign Tales and Traditions (Volume 2).djvu/397

 The trigger was pulled, but at the same instant the young bride herself uttered a piercing shriek, and fell to the ground.

“Incomprehensible girl!” exclaimed the commissioner, supposing that she had only been overcome by her feelings, and stepping forward to raise her up,—but a stream of blood flowed down her face, her forehead was shattered, and the deadly bullet lay in the wound.

“What has happened?” exclaimed William when the cry resounded behind him. He turned round and beheld Katherine lying in her blood in the agonies of death; and nigh to her, he saw the old fiendish-looking soldier, who stood eyeing the whole scene with an expression of hellish mockery in his features, muttering between his teeth:

William, in the agony and madness of mingled horror and despair, drew his hunting-knife, and made a thrust at the hideous figure, exclaiming: “Accursed! Is it thus thou hast deluded me?” More he could not utter, but sunk exhausted to the ground.

The commissioner and the priest vainly sought to comfort the bereaved parents. Scarcely had the mother laid the ill-omened funeral wreath on her daughter’s corpse, than her stricken heart ceased to beat. The father soon followed his wife and daughter to the land of spirits; and William breathed his last in a mad-house.