* * * * * The mob surrounded the mortuary, crept stealthily on tip-toe into the courtyard, peeped through the window, and whispered-- "Look! There he is! there he is!" The Patrol-officer, the priest, the magistrate, and Sange Moarte's mother entered the room. Right across the threshold lay the girl's father dead drunk; he got so tipsy yesterday from sheer sorrow that he will need all to-day and all to-morrow to sleep it off. In the middle of the room stood the pine-wood coffin, bedaubed with glaring roses fresh from the brush of a rural artist; within it lay the girl (she was only sixteen), her beautiful forehead encircled by a funereal wreath. A wax taper had been placed in one of her hands, in the other she held a small coin. At the head of the coffin burned two handsome wax candles stuck into a jar containing gingerbreads; at the foot of the coffin, in a gaudily-painted, high-backed chair, staring blankly at the girl's face, sat Sange Moarte. The pious superstition of the priest and the magistrate would not let them cross the threshold; but Clement stepped up to the lad, and immediately recognized in him the man on the rock who would not tell him the way. "Hi, young man! So you are he who has the bad habit of never replying to people when they address you, eh?" The person thus addressed justified the question by not answering it. "Now hearken and answer my question. I am the Patrol-officer. D'ye hear?" Sange Moarte remained speechless, with his eyes fixed all the time on Floriza. He was as motionless as the corpse itself, and scarcely seemed to breathe. His good old mother tenderly took him by the hand and called him by his proper name. "Jova, my son! answer the gentleman. Look at me, I am your mother." "In the name of my master, the Prince, I command you to answer me!" cried the Patrol-officer, raising his voice. The Wallach still remained silent. "I ask you if, in the course of your sylvan ramblings, you have seen any sort of foreign wild beast, to wit a yellow, speckled monster, which the learned call a panther?" Sange Moarte gave a start, as if suddenly aroused out of a deep sleep. His glassy eyes flashed and sparkled as he looked at his interrogator, a feverish scarlet flushed his cheeks, and he stammered tremulously-- "I have seen it, seen it, seen it." And with that he covered his eyes, so as not to look upon the dead body. "Where have you seen it?" asked the Patrol-officer. "Far, far away," whispered the Wallach; then he became dumb once more and buried his forehead in his hands. "Name the place. Where is it?" The Wallach looked timidly around. A cold shudder ran through him, and with fearful, rolling eyes he whispered to the Patrol-officer-- "In the Gradina Dracului."[36] [Footnote 36: _Gradina Dracului_. Garden of the Devil (Roumanian).]