"Elizabeth!" sighed the Celadon bitterly (Bessy was a name which could not be emphasized with sighs so well as Elizabeth), "dost thou not remember that solemn moment when we said to one another, 'How sweet it would be to die together this instant'? Has not our common friend said (here he looked at me), 'A good death is better than a bad life'? Come, let us verify that saying: wrapped in each other's embrace, heart throbbing responsive to heart, a dizziness, a plunge forward from this rock, and then a delicious flight whose goal will be the stars!"
"Go away with you! Don't make a fool of yourself! I have no wish to plunge into Heaven!"
"But I'll bear thee thither with me like a Valkyrian. And thou, my friend, wilt immortalize our final catastrophe in a heroic ballad."
And with that he seized the lady by the arm, and rushed with her upon the steep rocky ledge.
"Hast thou said thy prayers to-day, Desdemona?"
Bessy looked towards me with a timid look. I pretended to observe nothing. What had I to do with these amorous passages? I was frizzling bacon.
"Dost thou doubt me capable of dying with thee at this moment?" cried Valentine Bálványossi, with his wig awry over his eyes.
Then the lady cried with a supplicating voice: "Nay; but help me, dear Maurice!"
"Very well, I will help you," thought I; "I did it once before, so you say. Poets have long arms."
"Friend Valentine," said I, without rising from my squatting position beside the frizzling bacon, "don't you see those two men with muskets coming up this way along the mountain path?"