What must poor Jacqueline, so delicate and so tenderly nurtured, have suffered while forced to pursue such paths as these? We were now at least eight miles distant from Bourgneuf, and for her to have been dragged through a forest at midnight, and by such hands! The idea was too dreadful to embody in fancy, so let me hasten over what follows. At a part of the forest which was so dense that the intertwined branches of the trees almost excluded the light of the sun, the dog stopped at the root of a large elm, and began to bay loudly over some tufts of grass, leaves, and branches that were freshly heaped up there. He snorted, growled savagely, and then proceeded to tear up the little mound with his nose and forepaws. "The scent ends here," said the peasant, looking somewhat bewildered and alarmed. "There must be some mistake," said the chevalier, with annoyance in his tone; "we have been in pursuit of the wrong person. But some mystery may be concealed here. Urbain, Bertrand, scrape aside this heap, and let us see what the dog's nose has discovered." They readily plied their musket-butts, and then their hands, while I stood by, feeling more dead than alive, for the horror of anticipation overcame me. A bit of an orange silk dress appeared. Let me endeavour to write briefly and calmly of what followed. In a hollow, a hasty grave, half dug and half heaped up, about three feet deep in all, we found the body of Jacqueline, covered by leaves, branches, and tufts of grass. She lay upon her back; her right hand, so small and beautiful, clutched a tuft of grass; the teeth were clenched--there was no relaxation of the jaw--clenched as if with agony, and foam was plainly discernible on the white and parted lips; yet she was lovely like a dead angel, and all the divine serenity of innocence was there. Standing aloof like one transfixed or petrified, I saw them raise her up, and saw her head drooping pendulously backward with its long dishevelled hair clotted with blood, the bare bosom and the tattered dress. Then I heard Boisguiller exclaim in accents of horror, "She is dead now; but that mere wound could never have killed her--_she has been, stunned and buried alive_! Poor Jacqueline! What she has endured ere death released her, her lips can never tell us now." CHAPTER XV. THE FOREST OF ST. AUBIN DU CORMIER. When my thoughts took some coherence again, evening had come on, and I found myself alone and still in a forest--alone with the bloodhound, whose steel chain I grasped with an unyielding hand. I heard the rising wind shaking the tops of the lofty oaks. I remembered now, like one who, after a long and deep slumber, recals the passages of a dream, that near the tree beneath which we found _her_, Urbain the gardener had picked up a fur cap, which I had no difficulty in recognising as one that had been worn by Hautois.