emples as he thought of his mother. He sat up in bed,
feeling that he ought to go to his father and beg of him to escape
anywhere so as to avoid such a terrible fate. But the next minute his
thoughts came in a less confusing way, and he knew that he could not at
that late hour get to his father's side, and that even if he could his
ideas were childish. His father would smile at him, and tell him that
they were impossible--that no man of honour could fly so as to avoid
facing his difficulties, for it would be a contemptible, cowardly act,
impossible for him to commit.

"I know--I know," groaned the boy, as he flung himself down once more.
"I couldn't have run away to escape from a fight at school. It would
have been impossible. Why didn't I learn German instead of idling about
as I have! If I had I should have known what the baron said. What
could it have been?"

The hours crept sluggishly by, and sleep still avoided him. Not that he
wished to sleep, for he wanted to think; and he thought too much, lying
gazing at his window till there was a very faint suggestion of the
coming day; when, leaving his bed, he drew the curtain a little on one
side, to see that the stars were growing paler, and low down in the east
a soft, pearly greyness in the sky just over the black-looking trees of
the Park.

It was cold at that early hour, and he shivered and crept back to bed,
thinking that his mother in the apartments of the ladies of honour was
no doubt sleeping peacefully, in utter ignorance of the terrible time of
trouble to come; and then once more he lay down to think, as others have
in their time, how weak and helpless he was in his desires to avert the
impending calamity.

"No wonder I can't sleep," he muttered; and the next moment he slept.
For nature is inexorable when the human frame needs rest, or men would
not sleep peacefully in the full knowledge that it must be their last
repose on earth.

Five minutes after, his door was softly opened, a figure glided through
the gloom to his bedside, and bent over him, like a dimly seen shadow,
to catch him by the shoulder.

"Frank! Frank! Here, quick! Wake up!"

The lad sprang back into wakefulness as suddenly as if a trigger had
been touched, and all the drowsiness with which he was now charged had
been let off.

"Yes; what's the matter? Who's there?"

"Hush! Don't make a noise. Jump up, and dress."

"Drew?"

"Yes. Be quick!"

"But what's the matter?"