The courtships are long when love is based on respect.  She gave repose to the soul, not excitement to the spirit.  He saw that she admired him for his courage in daring so much—­more than he had fully realized—­for the despised and trampled-upon, and she pitied one before whom yawned the dreadful prison which rarely lets out the political prisoner with enough life in his wrecked frame to be worth living out.  But he did not see that she was truth and that he should follow her.  As the sailors drive the ship toward the false beacon, near them and garish and flaring, so he thought the erratic orb brighter than the serene fixed star.

He felt ungrateful.  This sneaking out of the town was ridiculous after the heroic introduction to La Belle Stamboulane.  He examined a pair of pistols which the host had generously presented him with, when, after the restless night, he rose with the dawn, and he determined to use them if assailed.  It is the inoffensive, quiet man who works most mischief when roused—­nothing so terrible even to the wolves as the sheep gone mad.  The student, having dipped his hand in blood, was now eager to be attacked on the highway by a company of unrepentant Von Sendlingens.

This was no mood, however, in which to start on a journey of possible peril.  Rebecca did not appear at the breakfast table.  She, too, had passed a wakeful night, but it was in prayer for the safety of the first real friend she had so far met among the Gentiles.  The host looked in at the conclusion of the meal.  Nothing could wear a fairer aspect.  Even the hovering figures which he, for good reason, set down as spies, had become tired of their useless quest, and disappeared with the fog that floated amid the smoke of the numerous brewery chimneys.

CHAPTER VIII.

A SECOND DEFEAT.

The sun was well up, showing a jolly red face, which indicated that he had been passing the night in the tropics, when Claudius, having said his farewell within the hospitable house where his bill had been obstinately withheld from him, took the reins in the chaise.  The grinning ostler held the unbarred door of the yard ready to open it quickly and slam it behind him.  At least, he had not the host’s delicacy and he had accepted his gratuity.

“Good speed, master!” he had hastily cried out as the equipage rolled out into the street.

It was deserted.  The horse and vehicle aroused no curiosity where odder animals and more curiously antiquated rattletraps were also out.  He traversed the town as unimpeded as a Czar environed by secret guards.  The officer at the gate, yawning behind the passport which he did not trouble to read, wished him a good dinner at the rural friend’s, where it was hinted he would put up, and returned into the guardroom to resume telling a dream which he wished interpreted.  Since Joseph, these functionaries at the gate and in prison seem to be tormented with puzzling visions.