Charlie passed a hand across his brow, and looked wildly in their faces, as if doubting their sanity or his own.
'Died!' he repeated mechanically.
'It is incomprehensible your being here,' said the Count, in a still more broken voice, and few could have seen that old man weeping unmoved, 'as her last words were, "Meet me at Burtscheid—at Burtscheid, dearest Carl."'
'And I have met her, seen her, spoken with her not two minutes since.'
'My poor friend,' said Heinrich, 'grief, or your wound, has turned your brain.'
'What madness is this?' asked Charlie, with a kind of bitter laugh in his voice, as he felt in no humour for jesting. 'Herr Graf, Herr Baron, Heinrich, my friend, Ernestine has been here with me, in this lonely church, for fully two hours!'
'And spoken with you?' said the Count, in an excited tone. 'Oh, if it should be that she still lives!'
'Lives!—great Heaven! Herr Graf—she was here with me, and I gave her a French cross with the bullet that wounded me.'
'He raves!' said the Baron Grunthal, with anger in his tone.
'She is there—in that room off the church.'