"Hey! major!" shouted the grenadier.

"Farewell!" a woman's voice called aloud.

An icy shiver ran through Philip de Sucy, and he dropped down where he
stood, overcome with cold and sorrow and weariness.



"My poor niece went out of her mind," the doctor added after a brief
pause. "Ah! monsieur," he went on, grasping M. d'Albon's hand, "what a
fearful life for a poor little thing, so young, so delicate! An
unheard-of misfortune separated her from that grenadier of the Garde
(Fleuriot by name), and for two years she was dragged on after the
army, the laughing-stock of a rabble of outcasts. She went barefoot, I
heard, ill-clad, neglected, and starved for months at a time;
sometimes confined to a hospital, sometimes living like a hunted
animal. God alone knows all the misery which she endured, and yet she
lives. She was shut up in a madhouse in a little German town, while
her relations, believing her to be dead, were dividing her property
here in France.

"In 1816 the grenadier Fleuriot recognized her in an inn in
Strasbourg. She had just managed to escape from captivity. Some
peasants told him that the Countess had lived for a whole month in a
forest, and how that they had tracked her and tried to catch her
without success.

"I was at that time not many leagues from Strasbourg; and hearing the