indow-pane from the original I had
given him to imitate; for the rest, to my surprise and gratitude, Brunow
volunteered. He took advantage of our next meeting with Breschia to
tell him that he was off on a three or four days' sketching expedition,
leaving me behind. He commended me to the lieutenant's friendly
hospitality with all his usual gayety of manner, and on the following
morning he rode away. The arrangement made between us was that he should
return at about ten o'clock on the following night with news of the
general's approach. The general's horses should appear to have come to
grief somehow, anyway (he guaranteed to find a plausible story),
and Brunow was to pretend to have ridden on with a message ordering
remounts. Then Hinge was to meet us at a given point, we being on foot,
and we should all make for the frontier with speed.

So long as I live I shall never forget that day or the day that followed
it. Hinge was advised of everything, and no doubt was doing all that
needed to be done, but the suspense was scarcely bearable. To saunter
about and look at those impenetrable walls, and to wonder what was going
on behind them--to invent a thousand accidents, any one of which might
wreck our plans for good and all, and to suffer in the contemplation of
each of these inventions of my own as much as I could have suffered
if it had been true, to read knowledge or suspicion in every innocent
glance that fell upon me, to fear and suspect everybody and everything,
and to keep a constant guard upon myself lest I should seem for an
instant to be anxious and preoccupied with all this weight upon me--all
this was an agony. I am not afraid to confess all this, for I have shown
more than once that I am not deficient in courage of my own kind. But
here I was a very coward, hateful and contemptible to myself.

The long day passed, and the long night, and then the real day of
waiting came. The thing that weighed upon me most of all was that while
I knew that every minute of rest and tranquillity I could snatch might
be of moment to me, rest and tranquillity were absolutely impossible.
For two whole nights I had not closed my eyes in sleep, and my brain
seemed on fire. My nerves were going, too, under this intolerable
strain, and I feared that if a crisis should arise I should lack
coolness, and plunge into some avoidable disaster.

But the day wore itself out at last, and at ten o'clock at night I was
wandering along the road