"There are only three of us who know anything about it. One is Ali the Turk; your mother has emancipated him, and he has now gone home to Thessaly. The second is the grave, and the grave tells no tales. I myself am the third, and I can keep as silent as the grave."
Valentine pressed his faithful friend to his heart and covered him with kisses. And then he kissed the grave and the flowers which covered it:
"Don't you hear how the specters are kissing each other?" whispered one of the musketeers.
"No doubt Lucifer is caressing them!"
"And whither then have you removed Augustus Zwirina?"
"Why, where he ought to be, of course! We laid the good man in the churchyard ditch in the place intended for Michal, and all the asses of the town will come and nibble their thistles over his head from one year's end to the other."
"Listen how the ghosts are laughing!"
"I would not go among them if they gave me the whole city of Kassa."
Even the howling wind seemed to take up the ghostly laughter and carry it on further. It was indeed a ghastly jest—a jest fit even to provoke a loud peal of laughter in a churchyard at midnight, that pretty Michal and the author of her death should have changed places with each other, that pretty Michal should have been laid in the flower-strewn bed, in the grave dug in consecrated ground and watered with tears, while the author of her death should have been cast forth into the churchyard ditch, to gaze up at the asses when they came to chew the thistles over his head.
"Now that you have spoken with your beloved, hasten away!"