'You have had no time to tell us much!' my lady answered smiling. 'And you are trembling like an aspen now. Sit down, girl. Sit down at once!' she continued imperatively. 'Or, no! You shall go to your bed, and we will hear it in the morning.'

But Marie seemed so much distressed by this that my lady did not insist; and in a few minutes the girl had told us a tale so remarkable that consideration of her fatigue was swallowed up in wonder.

'It was the night I was lost,' she said; 'the night when the alarm was given on the hill, and we rode down it. I clung to my saddle--it was all I could do--and remember only a dreadful shock, from which I recovered to find myself lying in the road, shaken and bruised. Fear of those whom I believed to be behind us was still in my mind, and I rose, giddy and confused, my one thought to get off the road. As I staggered towards the bank, however, I stumbled over something. To my horror I found that it was a woman. She was dead or senseless, but she had a child in her arms; it cried as I felt her face. I dared not stay, but, on the impulse of the moment--I could not move the woman, and I expected our pursuers to ride down the hill each instant--I snatched the child up and ran into the brushwood. After that I only remember stumbling blindly on through bog and fern, often falling in my haste, but always rising and pushing on. I heard cries behind me, but they only spurred me to greater exertions. At last I reached a little wood, and there, unable to go farther, I sank down, exhausted, and, I suppose, lost my senses, for I awoke, chilled and aching, in the first grey dawn. The leaves were black overhead, but the white birch trunks round me glimmered like pale ghosts. Something stirred in my arms. I looked down, and saw the face of my child--the child I found in the wood by Vach.'

'What!' the Countess cried, rising and staring at her. 'Impossible! Your wits were straying, girl. It was some other child.'

But Marie shook her head gently. 'No, my lady,' she said. 'It was my child.'

'Count Leuchtenstein's?'

'Yes, if the child I found was his.'

'But how--did it come where you found it?' the Countess asked.

'I think that the woman whom I left in the road was the poor creature who used to beg at our house in the camp,' Marie answered, hesitating somewhat--'the wife of the man whom General Tzerclas hung, my lady. I saw her face by a glimmer of light only, and, at the moment, I thought nothing. Afterwards it flashed across me that she was that woman. If so, I think that she stole the child to avenge herself. She thought that we were General Tzerclas' friends.'

'But then where is the child?' my lady exclaimed, her eyes shining. I was excited myself; but the delight, the pleasure which I saw in her face took me by surprise. I stared at her, thinking that I had never seen her look so beautiful.