darling, whom I bore beneath my bosom away from the fearful castle of
your father--I call him so for the first time, I must call him so once
again before I have done--Amante kissed you, sweet baby, blessed little
comforter, as if she never could leave off. And then she went away,
alive.

Two days, three days passed away. That third evening I was sitting
within my bolted doors--you asleep on your pillow by my side--when a
step came up the stair, and I knew it must be for me; for ours were the
topmost rooms. Some one knocked; I held my very breath. But some one
spoke, and I knew it was the good Doctor Voss. Then I crept to the door,
and answered.

"Are you alone?" asked I.

"Yes," said he, in a still lower voice. "Let me in." I let him in, and
he was as alert as I in bolting and barring the door. Then he came and
whispered to me his doleful tale. He had come from the hospital in the
opposite quarter of the town, the hospital which he visited; he should
have been with me sooner, but he had feared lest he should be watched.
He had come from Amante's death-bed. Her fears of the jeweller were
too well founded. She had left the house where she was employed that
morning, to transact some errand connected with her work in the town;
she must have been followed, and dogged on her way back through solitary
wood-paths, for some of the wood-rangers belonging to the great house
had found her lying there, stabbed to death, but not dead; with the
poniard again plunged through the fatal writing, once more; but this
time with the word "un" underlined, so as to show that the assassin was
aware of his previous mistake.

Numero _Un_.
Ainsi les Chauffeurs se vengent.

They had carried her to the house, and given her restoratives till she
had recovered the feeble use of her speech. But, oh, faithful, dear
friend and sister! even then she remembered me, and refused to tell
(what no one else among her fellow workmen knew), where she lived or
with whom. Life was ebbing away fast, and they had no resource but to
carry her to the nearest hospital, where, of course, the fact of her
sex was made known. Fortunately both for her and for me, the doctor in
attendance was the very Doctor Voss whom we already knew. To him, while
awaiting her confessor, she told enough to enable him to understand the
position in which I was left; before the priest had heard half her tale
Amante was dead.

Doctor Voss told me he had made all sorts of _detours_, a