aster
Pawson's words were true. Now all communication was cut off, for he was
a prisoner.

But his agony had reached its greatest height, and in a short time he
grew calmer; for light came into his darkened brain, and he told himself
he was glad that he had not been able to go and insult his mother by
asking such a question.

"It is horrible!" he said to himself; "and I must have been mad to think
such a thing possible. Liar! traitor! wretch! How could I think there
was the faintest truth in anything he said!"

Utterly exhausted, he took off his armour and laid it and his sword-belt
and empty scabbard aside.

"Done with now," he said, bitterly; and he sank upon the couch to try
and think whether he was to blame for not searching more for the passage
leading out beyond the moat.

"But I did try, and try hard," he muttered. "No; I could not foresee
that the man chosen by my father would betray us. It was my duty to
trust him. It was not my fault."

Through the remainder of that night he sat there thinking. Now
listening to the tramp of the sentries at his door and overhead upon the
ramparts, starting from time to time as he heard them challenge, and the
word passed on, till it died away; now thinking bitterly of the ease
with which they had been beaten, and of the men who must have fallen in
their defence. Then, from utter exhaustion, his eyes would close, and
consciousness leave him for a few minutes as he sank back.

But he never thoroughly went to sleep, the act of sinking back making
him start into wakefulness, bitter and angry with himself for these
lapses, and in every case springing up to pace the room.

"Poor mother! What she must have suffered through it all, and I
scarcely gave her a thought. That wretch must have locked her in her
room or she would certainly have been seeing to the wounded."

The clock chimed and struck, and chimed and struck again, with Roy
counting the long lingering hours as they went on, for he was longing
for the day to appear, hopeless as the dawn would be. But he wanted to
see the general, to beg that he might go to Lady Royland; and the time
when he would meet him seemed as if it would never come.

But at last the faint light began to dawn through the window, and, hot
and feverish, he threw it open, to look out across the court and over
the eastern ramparts at the coming signs of day, which grew brighter and
clearer till the sentinels upon the terrace-like place,