“My brave comrades, you are here to pay a last honor to your patroness.  There is nothing left for us to fight for.  Peace has been proclaimed.  The conqueror takes from you a plot of ground twenty-four hundred square miles in extent.  The one lying here takes from you only six feet of earth.  To you remain your tattered flag and your wounds.  Return to your homes.  My sword has finished its work, and will accompany the saint for whom it was drawn!”

As he spoke he broke the keen blade in twain and cast the pieces into the grave, adding impressively, “May God give us forgetfulness, and may we be forgotten!”

The Volons fired three salvos over the grave, the reverberating thunder and the flashing lightning mingling with the noise of the muskets.

When the storm had passed the moon rose in a cloudless sky.  Only the waves, which had been stirred by the tempest, continued to murmur to their favorite who was sleeping peacefully in her grave on the shore.

Marie had asked to be buried on the grassy slope by the side of her old friend the Marquis d’Avoncourt, and that no other monument should mark her resting-place save the imperishable tree which turns to stone after it dies.

And what could have been graven on her tomb?  A name that was not hers?  A history that was not true?

Or would it have been well to carve on the marble her true life-history, that those who would not believe it might wage a lawsuit against an epitaph?

No; it was better so.  No one would ever learn what had become of her.

Vavel had prayed for forgetfulness—­that he might be forgotten.

His prayer was granted.

For a few years afterward tales were repeated about Sophie Botta, and some of her kinsfolk came from a distance to claim the sum of money Vavel had placed in the hands of the authorities for the young girl’s heirs.  But none of the claimants could produce satisfactory proofs of kinship, and after a while Sophie Botta was forgotten by all the world, as were Count Vavel and Katharina.

The Nameless Castle as well vanished from the face of the earth, as have entire villages which once stood on the treacherous shores of Lake Neusiedl.

Gradually, imperceptibly, the castle disappeared; gradually, imperceptibly, bastion after bastion vanished, until not even the stone hand which held aloft the sword in the noble escutcheon, or the towering weathervane, could be seen above the placid waters of the lake.