dead by to-morrow."

"Make haste!" cried the voice of all, as one man.

"Come, major, they are grumbling, and they have a right to do so."

The Comte de Vandieres threw off his wrappings and showed himself in his
general's uniform.

"Let us save the count," said Philippe.

Stephanie pressed his hand, and throwing herself on his breast, she
clasped him tightly.

"Adieu!" she said.

They had understood each other.

The Comte de Vandieres recovered sufficient strength and presence of
mind to spring upon the raft, whither Stephanie followed him, after
turning a last look to Philippe.

"Major! will you take my place? I don't care a fig for life," cried the
grenadier. "I've neither wife nor child nor mother."

"I confide them to your care," said the major, pointing to the count and
his wife.

"Then be easy; I'll care for them, as though they were my very eyes."

The raft was now sent off with so much violence toward the opposite side
of the river, that as it touched ground, the shock was felt by all. The
count, who was at the edge of it, lost his balance and fell into the
river; as he fell, a cake of sharp ice caught him, and cut off his head,
flinging it to a great distance.

"See there! major!" cried the grenadier.

"Adieu!" said a woman's voice.

Philippe de Sucy fell to the ground, overcome with horror and fatigue.

CHAPTER III. THE CURE

"My poor niece became insane," continued the physician, after a few
moment's silence. "Ah! monsieur," he said, seizing the marquis's hand,
"life has been awful indeed for that poor little woman, so young,
so delicate! After being, by dreadful fatality, separated from the
grenadier, whose name was Fleuriot, she was dragged about for two years
at the heels of the army, the plaything of a crowd of wretches. She
was often, they tell me, barefooted, and scarcely clothed; for months
together, she had no care, no food but what she could pick up; sometimes
kept in hospitals, sometimes driven away like an animal, God alone knows
the horrors that poor unfortunate creature has survived. She was
locked up in a madhouse, in a little town in Germany, at the time
her relatives, thinking her dead, divided her property. In 1816, the
grenadier Fleuriot was at an inn in Strasburg, where she went after
making her escape from the madhouse. Several peasants told the grenadier
that she had lived for a whole month in the forest, where they had
tracked her in vain, trying to catch