hood hung far down over her face.  She danced continuously.  She danced with every one that asked her.  Had one, however, observed the actions of the young woman, they would certainly have seemed to him hurried, agitated, almost wild.  She looked no one in the eye, not even her own bridegroom.  He stood for the most part in the door-way, and evidently took more pleasure in the witticisms of the fool than in the dance or the lady dancers.  But who ever thought for a moment why the young woman’s hand burned, why her breath was so hot when one came near to her lips?  Who should have noticed so strange a thing?  A low whispering already passed through the company, a stealthy smile stole across many a lip.  A bevy of ladies was seen to enter the room suddenly.  The music dashed off into one of its loudest pieces, and, as if by enchantment, the newly made bride disappeared behind the ladies.  The bridegroom, with his stupid, smiling mien, was still left standing on the threshold.  But it was not long before he too vanished.  One could hardly say how it happened.  But people understand such skillful movements by experience, and will continue to understand them as long as there are brides and grooms in the world.

This disappearance of the chief personages, little as it seemed to be noticed, gave, however, the signal for general leave-taking.  The dancing became drowsy; it stopped all at once, as if by appointment.  That noisy confusion now began which always attends so merry a wedding-party.  Half-drunken voices could be heard still intermingled with a last, hearty laugh over a joke of the fool from Prague echoing across the table.  Here and there some one, not quite sure of his balance, was fumbling for the arm of his chair or the edge of the table.  This resulted in his overturning a dish that had been forgotten, or in spilling a beer-glass.  While this, in turn, set up a new hubbub, some one else, in his eagerness to betake himself from the scene, fell flat into the very debris.  But all this tumult was really hushed the moment they all pressed to the door, for at that very instant shrieks, cries of pain, were heard issuing from the entrance below.  In an instant the entire outpouring crowd with all possible force pushed back into the room, but it was a long time before the stream was pressed back again.  Meanwhile, painful cries were again heard from below, so painful, indeed, that they restored even the most drunken to a state of consciousness.

“By the living God!” they cried to each other, “what is the matter down there?  Is the house on fire?”

“She is gone! she is gone!” shrieked a woman’s voice from the entry below.

“Who? who?” groaned the wedding-guests, seized, as it were, with an icy horror.

“Gone! gone!” cried the woman from the entry, and hurrying up the stairs came Selde Klattaner, the mother of the bride, pale as death, her eyes dilated with most awful fright, convulsively grasping a candle in her hand.  “For God’s sake, what has happened?” was heard on every side of her.