ption.
But Aurelia knew only too well how differently the matter had really
stood; and it seemed to her impossible that, at all events, the men of
the police, who had apprehended the fellow in the Baroness's very
house, should not have known all about the intimacy of the relations
between them, inasmuch as she herself had told them his name, and
directed their attention to the brand-marks on his back, as proofs of
his identity. Moreover, this loquacious maid sometimes talked in a very
ambiguous way about that which people were, here and there, thinking
and saying; and, for that matter, would like very much to know better
about--as to the courts having been making careful investigations, and
having gone so far as to threaten the Baroness with arrest, on account
of strange disclosures which the hangman's son had made concerning her.

Aurelia was obliged to admit, in her own mind, that it was another
proof of her mother's depraved way of looking at things that, even
after this terrible affair, she should have found it possible to
go on living in the Residenz. But at last she felt herself constrained
to leave the place where she knew she was the object of but too
well-founded, shameful suspicion, and fly to a more distant spot. On
this journey she came to the Count's Castle, and there ensued what has
been related.

Aurelia could not but consider herself marvellously fortunate to have
got clear of all these troubles. But how profound was her horror when,
speaking to her mother in this blessed sense of the merciful
intervention of Heaven in her regard, the latter, with fires of hell in
her eyes, cried out in a yelling voice--

"You are my misfortune, horrible creature that you are! But in the
midst of your imagined happiness vengeance will overtake you, if I
should be carried away by a sudden death. In those tetanic spasms,
which your birth cost me, the subtle craft of the devil----"

Here Aurelia suddenly stopped. She threw herself upon her husband's
breast, and implored him to spare her the complete recital of what the
Baroness had said to her in the delirium of her insanity. She said she
felt her inmost heart and soul crushed to pieces at the bare idea of
the frightful threatenings--far beyond the wildest imagination's
conception of the terrible--uttered to her by her mother, possessed, as
she was at the time, by the most diabolical powers.

The Count comforted his bride to the best of his ability, although he
felt h