His face was pale and distraught, his locks were disheveled.
"Voila!" he said.

"Mon Dieu! It is my third attempt.

Always the same--hideous, monstrous, unearthly! It is she, and yet it is not she!" The doctor, professional man as he was and inured to such spectacles, was startled! The plate before him showed the Princess's face in all its beautiful contour, but only dimly veiling a ghastly death's-head below.

There was the whole bony structure of the head and the eyeless sockets; even the graceful, swan-like neck showed the articulated vertebral column that supported it in all its hideous reality.

The beautiful shoulders were there, dimly as in a dream--but beneath was the empty clavicle, the knotty joint, the hollow sternum, and the ribs of a skeleton half length! The doctor's voice broke the silence.