The next day was one of great quietness in the city of Thorn.  An uneasy, sultry pause of silence brooded over the lower town.  Men’s heads showed a moment at door and window, looked furtively up and down the street, and then vanished again within.  Plots were being hatched and plans laid in Thorn; yet, while there was the lowering silence in the city, up aloft the Wolfsberg hummed gayly like a hive.  Once I went up that way to see if I could win any news of my father.  But this day the door into the Red Tower stood closed, nor would any within open for all my knocking.  So perforce I had to return unsatisfied.  Several times I went to the Weiss Thor to spy the horizon round for the troops of Plassenburg.  But only the gray plain of the Mark stretched itself out so far as the eye could penetrate—­hardly a reeking chimney to be seen, or any token of the pleasant rustic life of man, such as in my youth I remembered to have looked down upon from the Red Tower.  Beneath me the city of Thorn lay grimly quiescent, like a beast of prey which has eaten all its neighbors, and must now die of starvation because there are no more to devour.

The day passed on feet that crept like those of a tortoise, as the sullen minutes dragged by, leaden-clogged and tardy.  But the evening came at last.  And with it, knocking at the door of the Bishop’s quadrangle and interrupting my long talk with Dessauer, lo! a messenger, hot-foot from the castle.

“To the learned Doctor and his servant, Gottfried Gottfried, being in death’s utmost extremities, sends greeting, and desires greatly to have speech with them.”

Thus ran my father’s message in that testing hour where he had seen so many!  Yet I was but little surprised.  There was no wonder in the fact save the wonder that it should all seem so natural.  Dessauer rose quickly.

“I will go with you,” he said; “it will be safer.  For at least I can keep the door while you speak with your father.”

So, without further word, we followed the messenger up the long, narrow, wooden-gabled street, and heard the folk muttering gloomily in the darkness within, or talking softly in the dull russet glow of their hearth-fires.  For there were but few lighted candles in Thorn that night.  And I wondered how near or how far from us tho men of Plassenburg might be encamping, and thrilled to think that at any moment a spy might ride in to warn Duke Otho of the spy within his city, or the near approach of his foe.

But so far all was quiet at the Red Tower.  The wicket-gate in the angle of the wall was open, and we passed in without difficulty.  As I mounted the stairs I heard the key turn behind us.  Obviously, therefore, we were expected.  The gate of the Red Tower had been left open for our entrance; and so soon as the birds were in the snare, it was shut, and the silly goslings trapped.

Nevertheless we climbed up and up the dark stairs till we came to the door of my father’s garret.  I pushed it open without knocking, and entered.