“Fräulein! Fräulein!”--the agitated accents were those of the many-tongued waiter,--“pray come down at once. The gracious Frau Oberstin has met with an accident. Boris the cowherd found her lying on the hillside just now, and they are bringing her in.” Startled and horrified, Nadia threw on a dressing-gown, and rushed down-stairs. The passage was filled with the hangers-on of the inn, who made way for her to pass into one of the smaller rooms on the ground-floor, into which a figure wearing the dress of the country-people had just been carried on a stretcher. Nadia looked round in amazement. This was a peasant woman, not her mother. But from the motionless form came a well-known voice. “You need not look so terrified, my daughter. I am not injured, merely too stiff to move. Absolutely I cannot stir a foot. It is evident that I have been walking in my sleep again. You remember that it is an old trick of mine? I suppose you must send for a doctor, for form’s sake, but pray do not let any one be alarmed.” It appeared that there was a doctor to be found at a little town some miles distant, and a messenger was despatched at once to bring him to Witska, while Nadia did her best to make her mother comfortable. Assisted by an excited maid-servant, who insisted on relating in bad German how it had happened to her, some weeks before, to meet the Frau Oberstin coming along the balcony at night with a candle in her hand and a fixed look in her eyes, she brought down a bedstead from one of the upper rooms, and succeeded in lifting Madame O’Malachy and placing her upon it, the sufferer still protesting that she felt no pain whatever, merely an inability to move. Nadia’s mind was occupied with the problem presented by the accident. If her mother had only been walking in her sleep, how had it happened that she had laid aside her own dress and put on the peasant costume? The place where she had been found was at the foot of a precipitous incline on which there abutted one of the walls of the garden belonging to the inn. Between the wall and the margin of the steep was a narrow ledge, affording just room for a sure-footed person to pass along it. It was unlikely that a sleep-walker would light upon this track without having seen it before; but any one who was bound on secret or important business would find it an excellent means of reaching the road which led down the mountain without being seen from the village. Was it possible that Madame O’Malachy had been carrying treasonable letters in disguise when a chance slip had made her lose her footing? This was the question which, try as she would, Nadia could not succeed in banishing from her mind during the earlier part of the day, but when the doctor arrived he gave a new direction to her thoughts. He was a taciturn man, and asked so few questions that Madame O’Malachy set him down as a fool; but when his examination was over he made a sign to Nadia to accompany him out of the room.