that he had risked his life to
bring from the Russian lines. He himself wore the grotesque and soiled
clothes, accoutrements, and cap that he had worn on the 29th of November
1812. He had even allowed his hair and beard to grow, and neglected his
appearance, that no detail might be lacking to recall the scene in all
its horror.

"I guessed what you meant to do," cried M. Fanjat, when he saw the
colonel dismount. "If you mean your plan to succeed, do not let her
see you in that carriage. This evening I will give my niece a little
laudanum, and while she sleeps, we will dress her in such clothes as
she wore at Studzianka, and put her in your traveling-carriage. I will
follow you in a berline."

Soon after two o'clock in the morning, the young Countess was lifted
into the carriage, laid on the cushions, and wrapped in a coarse
blanket. A few peasants held torches while this strange elopement was
arranged.

A sudden cry rang through the silence of night, and Philip and the
doctor, turning, saw Genevieve. She had come out half-dressed from the
low room where she slept.

"Farewell, farewell; it is all over, farewell!" she called, crying
bitterly.

"Why, Genevieve, what is it?" asked M. Fanjat.

Genevieve shook her head despairingly, raised her arm to heaven, looked
at the carriage, uttered a long snarling sound, and with evident signs
of profound terror, slunk in again.

"'Tis a good omen," cried the colonel. "The girl is sorry to lose her
companion. Very likely she sees that Stephanie is about to recover her
reason."

"God grant it may be so!" answered M. Fanjat, who seemed to be affected
by this incident. Since insanity had interested him, he had known
several cases in which a spirit of prophecy and the gift of second
sight had been accorded to a disordered brain--two faculties which many
travelers tell us are also found among savage tribes.

So it happened that, as the colonel had foreseen and arranged, Stephanie
traveled across the mimic Beresina about nine o'clock in the morning,
and was awakened by an explosion of rockets about a hundred paces from
the scene of action. It was a signal. Hundreds of peasants raised a
terrible clamor, like the despairing shouts that startled the Russians
when twenty thousand stragglers learned that by their own fault they
were delivered over to death or to slavery.

When the Countess heard the report and the cries that followed, she
sprang out of the carriage, and rushed in