awful truth.

"I can guess your purpose," cried Monsieur Fanjat, when he saw the
colonel getting out of the carriage. "If you want to succeed, do not
let my niece see you in that equipage. To-night I will give her opium.
During her sleep, we will dress her as she was at Studzianka, and place
her in the carriage. I will follow you in another vehicle."

About two in the morning, the sleeping countess was placed in the
carriage and wrapped in heavy coverings. A few peasants with torches
lighted up this strange abduction. Suddenly, a piercing cry broke the
silence of the night. Philippe and the doctor turned, and saw Genevieve
coming half-naked from the ground-floor room in which she slept.

"Adieu, adieu! all is over, adieu!" she cried, weeping hot tears.

"Genevieve, what troubles you?" asked the doctor.

Genevieve shook her head with a motion of despair, raised her arm to
heaven, looked at the carriage, uttering a long-drawn moan with every
sign of the utmost terror; then she returned to her room silently.

"That is a good omen!" cried the colonel. "She feels she is to lose her
companion. Perhaps she SEES that Stephanie will recover her reason."

"God grant it!" said Monsieur Fanjat, who himself was affected by the
incident.

Ever since he had made a close study of insanity, the good man had
met with many examples of the prophetic faculty and the gift of second
sight, proofs of which are frequently given by alienated minds, and
which may also be found, so travellers say, among certain tribes of
savages.

As the colonel had calculated, Stephanie crossed the fictitious plain of
the Beresina at nine o'clock in the morning, when she was awakened by a
cannon shot not a hundred yards from the spot where the experiment was
to be tried. This was a signal. Hundreds of peasants made a frightful
clamor like that on the shore of the river that memorable night, when
twenty thousand stragglers were doomed to death or slavery by their own
folly.

At the cry, at the shot, the countess sprang from the carriage, and ran,
with delirious emotion, over the snow to the banks of the river; she saw
the burned bivouacs and the charred remains of the bridge, and the fatal
raft, which the men were launching into the icy waters of the Beresina.
The major, Philippe, was there, striking back the crowd with his sabre.
Madame de Vandieres gave a cry, which went to all hearts, and threw
herself before the colonel, whose heart beat wildly. Sh