were
forced, when a knight, at the head of a small but hardy troop, rushed
down from the mountain side and turned the tide of the fray. Wherever
his sword flashed fell a foe. Wherever his war-cry sounded was a space
of dead men in the thick of the battle. The fight was won; the convent
saved; the abbess and the sisterhood came forth to bless their
deliverer. Laid under an aged oak, he was bleeding fast to death; his
head was bare and his locks were grey, but scarcely yet with years.
One only of the sisterhood recognized that majestic face; one bathed
his parched lips; one held his dying hand; and in Leoline's presence
passed away the faithful spirit of the last lord of Liebenstein!

"Oh!" said Gertrude, through her tears; "surely you must have altered
the facts,--surely--surely--it must have been impossible for Leoline,
with a woman's heart, to have loved Otho more than Warbeck?"

"My child," said Vane, "so think women when they read a tale of love,
and see the whole heart bared before them; but not so act they in real
life--when they see only the surface of character, and pierce not its
depths--until it is too late!"

"DR. MANETTE'S MANUSCRIPT"

By CHARLES DICKENS

I, Alexandre Manette, unfortunate physician, native of Beauvais, and
afterwards resident in Paris, write this melancholy paper in my doleful
cell in the Bastille, during the last month of the year, 1767. I write
it at stolen intervals, under every difficulty. I design to secrete it
in the wall of the chimney, where I have slowly and laboriously made a
place of concealment for it. Some pitying hand may find it there, when
I and my sorrows are dust.

"These words are formed by the rusty iron point with which I write with
difficulty in scrapings of soot and charcoal from the chimney, mixed
with blood, in the last month of the tenth year of my captivity. Hope
has quite departed from my breast. I know from terrible warnings I
have noted in myself that my reason will not long remain unimpaired,
but I solemnly declare that I am at this time in the possession of my
right mind--that my memory is exact and circumstantial--and that I
write the truth as I shall answer for these my last recorded words,
whether they be ever read by men or not, at the Eternal Judgment-seat.

"One cloudy moonlight night in the third week of December (I think the
twenty-second of the month) in the year 1757, I was walking on a
retired part of the quay by the Seine fo