lowly rose from his knees, surveyed his tatterdemalion son
from head to foot with infinite contempt, and his lips moved and
quivered as if they would have said something, but not a word fell from
them.

The son did not know that his father had had a stroke and could not
speak.

"Have you not one word for me?--bad or good, a curse or a blessing? Only
a single word, father! before you see me die!" and he dragged himself on
his knees to the feet of the old man, who supported himself tremulously
against the altar that had been placed opposite the two coffins, his
hair seemed to rise, his eyes started from his head. Then he seized the
heavy gilded crucifix and slowly raised it aloft in his right hand as if
he would have stricken to the earth with it his own son who knelt there
embracing his knees.

During this painful scene the door opened, the clash of the butt ends of
muskets brought sharply to the ground was heard, and a corporal and
three soldiers appeared on the scene.

Imre looked round at this noise. For an instant his face turned deadly
pale; behind the backs of the soldiers he perceived the grinning face of
his evil angel, the headsman's 'prentice. He felt that he was lost.

He glanced around him. Whither should he flee for refuge? Close beside
him were two corpses with cold unsympathetic faces--and there was also a
third, a living face, still colder, still more unsympathetic than the
faces of the dead, living and yet not loving, the face of his own father
who still stood there with the large heavy crucifix in his uplifted
fist.

The corporal approached the youth and seized him by the collar. What did
it matter to him that the culprit was standing beside two corpses
covered with a funeral pall? what did he care about the painfulness of
the scene? Naturally he only saw before him a deserter, a deserter whom
it was his duty to arrest.

At this the youth grew absolutely desperate, and at the same time the
instinct of self-preservation arose within him. In one magical moment
there flashed through his mind all the horrors which the future had in
store for him--the cold dungeon wall, the narrow barred windows, the
heavy rattling chain, the court-martial, the reading of the sentence,
the pillory, the gaping crowd, the white shirt worn by the condemned,
the man of death, the executioner, with a Prayer Book in one hand and a
cord in the other, the ignominious death, the black carrion crows----

"Ah!" he roared in d