"Bless me!" cried Caroline to the husband, "have you no fear for your wife and child?" He understood the gesture, if not the words, and called out to his wife not to drop the little one, then launched forth anew in a dismal air, which resembled a religious chant. Caroline soon became used to the dizziness; she would not be tempted into turning her back to the precipice, as the peasant motioned for her to do. The country was so fine and so strange, the splendor of the moon made it look so terrible, that she was unwilling to lose anything of the novel spectacle. In the angles of the ascent, when the oxen had turned the fore wheels, and the log still held the hind wheels to their former course until they threatened to go over the brink, the astonished traveller unconsciously stiffened herself up a little on her stirrup of rope. Then the driver would speak to his oxen in a calm and gentle tone, and his voice, which seemed to adapt their docile steps to the least unevenness of the ground, reassured Caroline as if it had been the voice of a mysterious spirit shaping her destiny. "And yet why should I be afraid?" she asked herself. "Why should I cling to a life which will be henceforth full of dread?--to a succession of days which in prospect are a hundred times more frightful than death! If I fell into this chasm, I should be instantly crushed. And even if I suffered an hour or two before my death, what would that be compared with the years of sorrow, loneliness, and perhaps despair, which await me!" We see that Caroline at last had owned to her love and her grief. Their full extent she had not yet measured, and, as she thought about that instinctive love of life which had just made her shudder, bold as she was by nature, she tried to persuade herself that it was a presentiment,--a celestial promise of speedy relief. "Who knows! Perhaps I shall forget sooner than I think. Have I any right to wish for death! Can I even afford to give way to grief, and waste my strength! Can my sister and her children do without me? Do I want them to live on the charity of those who have driven me away? Must I not soon go to work again, and, in order to work, shall I not be obliged to forget everything that is not work?" And then she was troubled even by her own courage. "What," she said to herself again,--"what if this were only a snare of hope!" Some of M. de Villemer's words came back to her, and certain phrases in his book that showed a wonderful amount of energy, penetration, and perseverance. Would such a man give up a plan he was bent upon, allowing himself to be deceived by stratagem, and would he not have in its highest power that divining sense which is a part of love!