“Oh, yes! Yes, indeed! Yes, your grace, that’s—” (sneeze)—“very plain indeed, my lord. But, begging your pardon, your grace—” (sneeze)—“we’ve got one of them back, haven’t we? So why, if you don’t mind my asking, do we need the second one back, if I may make so bold as to ask?”

“Because if I know anything about Zamiel, he won’t be satisfied with one. He’ll want a square meal, not a snack. One adult might do—but one small girl wouldn’t be enough. Of course, I could always leave you up there, Snivelwurst.”

“No! No! You wouldn’t! Oh, ha, ha, what a wit you are, your grace! Leave me—dear, dear, what a joke!”

“Well, if we don’t find her,” said Count Karlstein, “we’ll have to leave someone else up there.”

“May I suggest—” (sneeze)—“a certain young girl from the village here? The one I have in mind, sir, is she—” (sneeze)—“whom you lately employed as maid, Hildi Kelmar by name, sir.”

“Interfering wench. I dismissed her this afternoon. Where is she now?”

“In the Jolly Huntsman, your grace. If I am not mistaken, it was she who gave the alarm of fire in the parlor a little while back, to our great discomfiture, your grace.” (Sneeze.)

“A mischief-maker, eh? No one’ll miss her, then. Not a bad idea, Snivelwurst….”

Now, that little conversation might have meant nothing at all to a lot of people. It would even have meant nothing to the great Cadaverezzi, I have no doubt. But it meant a good deal to me, because I was brought up by the most fearful, superstitious old band of ninnies there ever was. I was an orphan, you see, and in the orphanage in Geneva there was an old woman called Maria Neumann, who was in charge of all of us young blisters that was there, and she couldn’t control us at all—poor old thing. We used to run riot. The only way she could make us do what we were told was by threatening us with the Demon Huntsman—the great and horrible Zamiel, the Prince of the Mountains, on his black horse, with his pack of luminous hounds and skeletons for his whippers-in. We shut up then all right. She used to smack her old lips together at the thought of us young ruffians being haunted by those frightful hounds—made our blood run cold. Even now it makes me shiver a bit; but then—under that bush, with two villains scheming some kind of devilry—to hear the name Zamiel gave me a proper turn.