Impossible! the Marquis has been hanged this twelvemonth!" CHAP. V.-THE DEPARTURE. "Good heavens! how strange," said the lawyer, as he dismissed the landlord of the little inn. "I am very much obliged to you-only thinkI was just going to marry my daughter to a gentleman who had been hanged!" Laura burst into tears. "What if he should be a vampire!" said she; "it is very odd that a man should live twelve months after hanging." Meanwhile the stranger descended the stairs to his parlour; a group of idlers in the passage gave way hastily on both sides. Nay, the housemaid, whom he was about, as usual, to chuck under the chin, uttered a loud shriek, and fell into a swoon. "The devil!" said the stranger, glancing suspiciously round. " am I known then ?"-" Known! yes, you are known!” cried the boots. "The Marquis de Tête Perdu."-" Sacre bleu !" said the stranger, flinging into the parlour in a violent rage. He locked the door. He walked up and down with uneven strides. "Curse on these painful distinctions—these hereditary customs!" cried he vehemently, "they are the poison of my existence. I shall lose Laura; I shall lose her fortune; I am discovered. No, not yet; I will fly to her, before the boots spreads the intelli gence. I will force her to go off with me-go off!-how many people have I forced to go off before!" To avoid the people in the passage, the stranger dropped from the window. hastened to the lawyer's house--he found Miss Laura in the garden-she was crying violently, and had forgotten her pocket-handkerchief; the stranger offered her his own. Her eyes fell on a marquis's coronet, worked in the corner, with the initials" "T. P." "Ah! it is too true, then," said she, sobbing; "the-the Marquis de Tête He Fercu-." Here her voice was choked by her emotion. "Damnation! what-what of him?" With great difficulty Laura sobbed out the word "H-a-ng-e-d!"—" It is all up with me!" said the stranger, with a terrible grimace, and he disappeared. "Oh! he is certainly a vampire," wept the unfortunate Laura; "at all events, after having been hanged for twelve months he cannot be worth much as a husband!" CHAP. VI. THE JEALOUSY. "AH, miss!" said the tailor, as he passed through the country town on a high trotting horse, and met the unfortunate Laura walking homeward with "The Sorrows of Werter" in her hand: "Ah! so the spark has carried himself off! How could you be so taken in? What! marry a "I know what you would say," interrupted Laura, haughtily, "and I beg you will be silent."-" You knew him, then?" |