And thus the heckling went from street to street, being the usual mode, after the custom of those times, of shaming a backward combatant into action. And, indeed, it was surprising that Michael Dóronczius did not come forward to fight with the youth who jeered at him so, nor even sent to arrest him, inasmuch as he was quite able to do both, being both a strong muscular man and, at the same time, chief magistrate of the city. But, instead of doing either the one or the other, he said that they were to let young Sándor depart in peace wherever he liked to go.
Nevertheless, later on, when the first intoxication of rage had evaporated from the head of Joseph, he bethought him that, after so much heckling on his part, it was not perhaps very advisable for him to remain in the near neighbourhood of so powerful an enemy, and accordingly one night he privily escaped from the town, and not even his father knew whither he had gone.
Meanwhile time went on, and Catharine grew paler and paler, and no medicine had power to help her. And suddenly the whole miserable mystery was revealed.
On the night before Ascension Day, just after the blowing of the two-o'clock horn, a watchman perceived a woman's shape, wrapped in a long cloak, hastening stealthily along the walls in the direction of the city trench. The watchman followed in the traces of this figure, and saw how this servant-wench—for such he judged her to be—on reaching the trenches, placed on the ground something wrapped up in a bundle, and then produced a spade and began to dig.
When she had scooped out a good deep hole, she knelt down beside the wrapped-up object, and, covering her face with her hands, began to weep bitterly. Then she suddenly left off weeping, and looked timidly round to see if any one was near.
Then the night watchman went up to her and seized her hand, and bawled loudly in her ear, "What art thou doing there?"
The girl immediately fell back and fainted without answering him, but the object lying open there before him plainly told him what was being done. It was a little new-born baby, a pretty little chubby-faced child; but dead and stiff.
There was no wound upon it, but only a little pin-prick just over the region of the heart, nor was there any blood on its little white shift, save only a single drop, but that had been enough to make the innocent creature die.
At the cry of the night watchman, many people came running up, and they were horrified to recognize in the murderess and mother of the child, Catharine, the former bride of Joseph Sándor, who must certainly have run away from her bridegroom's house on the night of the marriage because she would not practise a vile deception on that worthy man.