e of touching each other, however
close they might be.

"Raoul here!" murmured he. "Oh! Grimaud, why did you not tell me this?"

Grimaud shook his head, and made no reply; but taking D'Artagnan by
the hand, he led him to the coffin, and showed him, under the thin
winding-sheet, the black wounds by which life had escaped. The captain
turned away his eyes, and, judging it was useless to question Grimaud,
who would not answer, he recollected that M. de Beaufort's secretary had
written more than he, D'Artagnan, had had the courage to read. Taking up
the recital of the affair which had cost Raoul his life, he found these
words, which ended the concluding paragraph of the letter:

"Monseigneur le duc has ordered that the body of monsieur le vicomte
should be embalmed, after the manner practiced by the Arabs when they
wish their dead to be carried to their native land; and monsieur le duc
has appointed relays, so that the same confidential servant who brought
up the young man might take back his remains to M. le Comte de la Fere."

"And so," thought D'Artagnan, "I shall follow thy funeral, my dear
boy--I, already old--I, who am of no value on earth--and I shall scatter
dust upon that brow I kissed but two months since. God has willed it to
be so. Thou hast willed it to be so, thyself. I have no longer the right
even to weep. Thou hast chosen death; it seemed to thee a preferable
gift to life."

At length arrived the moment when the chill remains of these two
gentlemen were to be given back to mother earth. There was such an
affluence of military and other people that up to the place of the
sepulture, which was a little chapel on the plain, the road from the
city was filled with horsemen and pedestrians in mourning. Athos had
chosen for his resting-place the little inclosure of a chapel erected by
himself near the boundary of his estates. He had had the stones, cut
in 1550, brought from an old Gothic manor-house in Berry, which had
sheltered his early youth. The chapel, thus rebuilt, transported, was
pleasing to the eye beneath its leafy curtains of poplars and sycamores.
It was ministered in every Sunday, by the cure of the neighboring bourg,
to whom Athos paid an allowance of two hundred francs for this service;
and all the vassals of his domain, with their families, came thither to
hear mass, without having any occasion to go to the city.

Behind the chapel extended, surrounded by two high hedges of
hazel, elder and wh