almost on his face in the corner, and kept moaning and praying in Russian, of which none of us understood a syllable but old Wenzel.  Emerich and I would have spoken to him, but the woodman stopped us with a strange sign.  Count Theodore had taken the relic of some saint from a pocket-book which he carried in his breast, and was, in Russian fashion as I think, confessing his sins over it; while his sister sat silent and motionless by the fire, with livid face and clasped hands.  It was burning low, but I saw the woodman’s face darken.  He stepped to the corner and took down his gun, as I believed, to take the last shot at the wolves; but Count Theodore was in his way.  He levelled it for an instant at the prostrate man, and before I could speak or interpose, the report, followed by a faint shrill shriek from the Russian, rang through the hut.  We rushed to him, but the count was dead.  A bullet had gone right through the heart.

‘My gun has shot the count, and the wolves will leave us now,’ said Wenzel coolly.  ’I heard him say in his prayers that a Finn, now in the Siberian mines, had vowed to send them on him and his company wherever he went.’

As the woodman spoke, he handed to Count Emerich, with a hoarse whisper, a bloody pocket-book, taken from the dead body, and turning to Juana, said something loud and threatening to her in the Russian tongue; at which the lady only bowed her head, seeming of all in the hut to be the least surprised or concerned at the death of her brother.  As for us, the complicated horrors of the night had left us stunned and stupified till the rapid diminution of the wolfish din, the sounds of shots and voices, and the glare of flambeaux lighting up the forest, brought most of us to the window.  The wolves were scouring away in all directions, there was a grayness in the eastern sky, for Christmas-day was breaking; and from all sides the count and my uncle’s tenantry, with skates and sledges, guns and torches, were pouring to the rescue as we shouted to them from the cottage.

They had searched for us almost since midnight, fearing that something terrible had detained Father Cassimer and his company from mass.  There were wonderfully few wolves shot in the retreat, and we all went home to Count Emerich’s house, but not in triumph, for with us went the body of the Russian, of which old Wenzel was one of the bearers.  The unanimous determination we expressed to bring him to justice as a murderer, was silenced when Emerich shewed us in confidence a letter from the Russian minister, and a paper with all our names in a list of the disaffected in Upper Lithuania, which he had found in Theodore’s pocket-book.  After that, we all affirmed that Wenzel’s gun had gone off by accident; and on the same good Christmas-day, Count Emerich, with a body of his retainers, escorted the Lady Juana to a convent at the other end of the province, the superior of which was his aunt.  There she became a true Catholic, professed, and, as I was told, turned to