“He is still alive,” replied a young man in answer to Mr. White’s hurried inquiry.  We rapidly ascended the stairs, and in the front apartment of the first floor beheld one of the saddest, mournfulest spectacles which the world can offer—­a fine, athletic man, still in the bloom of natural health and vigor, and whose pale features, but for the tracings there of fierce, ungoverned passions, were strikingly handsome and intellectual, stretched by his own act upon the bed of death!  It was La Houssaye!  Two gentlemen were with him—­one a surgeon, and the other evidently a clergyman, and, as I subsequently found, a magistrate, who had been sent for by the surgeon.  A faint smile gleamed over the face of the dying man as we entered, and he motioned feebly to a sheet of paper, which, closely written upon, was lying upon a table placed near the sofa upon which the unhappy suicide was reclining.  Mr. White snatched, and eagerly perused it.  I could see by the vivid lighting up of his keen gray eye that it was, in his opinion, satisfactory and sufficient.

“This,” said Mr. White, “is your solemn deposition, knowing yourself to be dying?”

“Yes, yes,” murmured La Houssaye; “the truth—­the truth!”

“The declaration of a man,” said the clergyman with some asperity of tone, “who defyingly, unrepentingly, rushes into the presence of his Creator, can be of little value!”

“Ha!” said the dying man, rousing himself by a strong effort; “I repent—­yes—­yes—­I repent!  I believe—­do you hear?—­and repent—­believe.  Put that down,” he added, in tones momently feebler and more husky, as he pointed to the paper; “put that down, or—­or perhaps—­Eu—­genie—­perhaps”—­

As he spoke, the faint light that had momently kindled his glazing eye was suddenly quenched; he remained for perhaps half a minute raised on his elbow, and with his outstretched finger pointing towards the paper, gazing blindly upon vacancy.  Then the arm dropped, and he fell back dead!

We escaped as quickly as we could from this fearful death-room, and I found that the deposition which Mr. White brought away with him gave a full, detailed account, written in the French language, of the circumstances which led to the death of Mrs. Rushton.

La Houssaye, finding that M. de Tourville had by some means discovered the secret of his previous marriage, and that consequently all hope of obtaining the hand of Eugenie, whom he loved with all the passion of his fiery nature, would be gone unless De Tourville could be prevented from communicating with his daughter, resolved to compass the old man’s instant destruction.  The chevalier persuaded himself that, as he should manage it, death would be attributed to the affection of the heart, from which M. de Tourville had so long suffered.  He procured the distilled laurel-water—­how and from whom was minutely explained—­colored, flavored it to resemble as nearly as possible the cordial which he knew M. de Tourville—­and