"You are mistaken. Count Kronhelm is not in this house."

"He is here, madame-all your servants testify against you. I know that he is concealed in this room"-he looked about him-" or in that one." He pointed to the door which led to the dressing-room.

"I swear to you, by God in heaven," cried Agatha, "that the count is not here. He is not in the house."

But when the officer advanced toward the dressing-room, she preceded him by a rapid movement, leaned with her back against the door, and cried:

"I shall never permit my wardrobe to he searched, as if I had been accused of theft. I swear to you again, that Count Kronhelm is not in there. He is not in this house."

"He is! He cannot have escaped. All the doors are guarded."

"Look for him elsewhere, then. He is not here." "Let us go in, madame,” cried the officer, impatiently. "Step back.”

"I shall not step back. No lady of rank will submit to such indignities."

" Vio

But he seized her roughly by the shoulder, and drew her aside in spite of her resistance. lence!" cried Agatha in terror.

Suddenly the door was unlocked from the inside. "Use your bravery against men, sir lieutenant," said a scornful voice. The officer and his companion entered the dark room; the privates, who, until then had remained by the outer door, rushed up and placed themselves in the door of the dressing-room, pushing Agatha out of their way.

Inside there was perfect darkness, except that a strip of the faint light of the evening twilight fell from the sitting-room through the open door.

A tall figure, wrapped in a cloak, a flat hat pushed far down over its face, stood leaning against the wall opposite the door.

"Monsieur the count," said the officer, "I arrest you in the name of the senate."

"Where is your order of arrest, lieutenant?"

"Here," replied the other, showing him the paper. "It is not valid. The king's signature is wanting."

The officer, without considering that the other could not possibly have discovered this in the dark, replied:

"The king's seal is sufficient. You are my prisoner, monsieur the count."

But the corporal had had time to examine the dark figure more closely. The foreign accent had struck him suspiciously. He opened the shutter hastily.

"Sir lieutenant," he cried, "this is not Count Kronhelm!"

"Who told you that I was Count Kronhelm? I am a stranger, under the protection of the English ambassador, and shall call you to account if you lay hands on me."

"Where is the count?" cried the officer, furious at his mistake. "You have helped him to escape! He must be somewhere."

"There must be a door here somewhere. The fellow down-stairs said something about a back door," observed the corporal.

They were about to fall upon him. But Mannsfeld leaned still more firmly against the door. As he tried to spread his cloak more at the bottom, it slid from his shoulder, and disclosed his mutilated arm in its sling. A trace of the tapestry door became visible. The officer as well as his subordinate rushed upon him. But he held his powerful right arm against them like a shield. "Let no one dare to touch me!"

he cried.

The officer considered himself in the right. He drew his sword. The corporal followed his example. "If you love your life," cried the lieutenant, "make way!"

At this, Mannsfeld, with the rapidity of lightning, drew a pistol from his bosom, and prepared to fire. "Whoever touches me is lost! I will give you access to the door now, if you will put up your swords."

"Murder!" vociferated the lieutenant, who had sprung to one side at sight of the pistol. As Mannsfeld turned threateningly to the corporal, who still stood on his right with drawn sword, the officer, with the bound of a wild-cat, sprang upon his shoulder from the left, where his mutilated arm gave no means of defence, and half pulled him to the ground, while the corporal buried his sword in his body. The pistol went off in the hand of the falling man, the apartment was filled with the smoke of powder. The murderous weapon had contained no ball.

The murderers rushed across the body of their victim, out of the door, and down the stairs, the privates after them. Caritas, on her return by circuitous paths through the garden and the front door, followed

by the children and Ingeborg and the other women of the house, pale and trembling with terror, found her mother lying in unconsciousness beside the corpse of her father.

He had been still alive, still conscious, when the loving woman took him in her arms. "I die in your arms," he murmured with broken voice-"I am happy to die so. God has dealt more kindly with me than I had hoped. Continue to live for your children's sake! I have rescued their father for them. He will be Carry's father too."

The unfortunate man might perhaps have been saved, if there had been a surgeon at hand to stop the bleeding. The women laid him on the bed, cut open his clothes, and bound up the enormous, gaping wound as well as they could, but the skilful hand was wanting. Life had been long extinct when the surgeon, who had been sent for from a distance, at length arrived. Agatha still lay in a state of unconsciousness. Inconsolable and only upheld by the youthful vigor of an heroic nature, the young orphan hovered to and fro between the couches of her beloved parents.

The emissaries of the senate, after having examined the cellars, the garret, and the whole garden, rode away, cursing. Their leaders, overwhelmed with reproaches by some of the weeping maid-servants, did not venture to enter the house again. A gloomy, desolate silence brooded over the whole place.

CHAPTER XIV.

CONCLUSION.

MORE than two long, eventful months had passed. The friends of the king had paid, for the crime of attempting to alter the constitution, on the scaffold. The unhappy monarch, who, by a cruel decree of his tyrants, was deprived of the noblest privilege of crowned heads, the power of pardoning, could not save them nor hardly himself, indeed, except by solemnly declaring that he had not known any thing of the conspiracy raised in his favor. Those among his friends who were less implicated were outlawed, among them Count Kronhelm.

Mannsfeld was buried in the quiet garden at Söderwyk. A plain stone, overshadowed by a weepingwillow, marked the spot. The name of "Moritz Mannsfeld" was inscribed upon the stone, together with the words, "He died, murdered by the servants of the law, a victim to his magnanimity."

In the house Caritas still sat by her mother's sickbed. When the unhappy woman at length awoke from her swoon, her mind was far away. The most celebrated physicians of Stockholm came and went,