to Milan and denounce me as a
traitor. My character is well enough known not to need corroboration to
your charge; the allegation will never hurt me, and it may serve _you_,
Ay, Herr Lieutenant, it will prove an opportune escape for the
disgrace of this unlucky night. They will forgive you much for such a
disclosure."

Frank's temper would have been insufficient to bear such an insult
as this, had not the words been spoken by one already excited to the
madness of fever, and whose eye now flashed with the wild glare of
mania.

It was long before Frank could calm down the passionate excitement of
the sick man, and fit him for the task he wished to execute; and even
then Ravitzky undertook it in a sullen, resentful spirit that seemed to
say that nothing short of the necessity would have reduced him to such
a confidence. Nor was this all. Pain and nervous irritability together
made him difficult, and occasionally impossible, to understand. The
names of people and places of Hungarian origin Frank in vain endeavored
to spell; the very utmost he could do being to follow the rapid
utterance with which the other at times spoke, and impart something like
consistency to his wild, unconnected story.

That Ravitzky had been employed in secret communications with some of
the Hungarian leaders was plain enough, and that he had held intercourse
with many not yet decided how to act was also apparent. The tangled web
of intrigue was, however, too intricate for faculties laboring as his
were; and what between his own wanderings and Frank's misconceptions,
the document became as mysterious as an oracle. Perhaps Frank was
not sorry for this obscurity; or, perhaps, like the lady who consoled
herself for the indiscretion of keeping a lover's picture by the
assurance that "it was not like him," he felt an equal satisfaction in
thinking that the subject of his manuscript could never throw any light
upon any scheme that ever existed. Now it ran on about the feelings
of the Banat population, and their readiness to take up arms; now it
discussed the fordage #of rivers in Transylvania. Here was an account
of the arms in the arsenal of Arad; there a suggestion how to cut off
Nugent's corps on the Platen See. At times it seemed as if a great Sclav
revolt were in contemplation; at others the cause appeared that of the
Hungarian nobles alone, anxious to regain all the privileges of the old
feudalism. "At all events, it is rebellion," thought Frank;