He had no idea that another carriage would be attached to the train especially to accommodate Prince Ernest and his suite. Yet such was the case.
The train started. It was the express, and it went on at a tremendous rate. Houses, streets, suburbs, fields, woods, towns flew behind it.
How did our travelers pass the two or three hours of their journey? They were going down by the express, for the avowed purpose of engaging in a mortal combat. It might be supposed that their time would be spent in sorely troubled thought. Will it be believed that it was passed in—sleep?
Yet so it was. Human nature must sleep. The condemned criminal sleeps the night before his execution; the victim on the rack has been known to sleep in the intervals between each turn of the screw; the agonized mother drops asleep in the interims of her travail.
Alexander was going to kill or to be killed; Francis Tredegar was going down to help him meet either fate. Yet these by no means hardened sinners, really slept.
Worn out by want of rest, and affected by the swift motion of the train, they slept soundly—waking up only once in a while, when the train would stop at some unusually noisy way station.
Doubtless on these wakings both would realize with a pang of recollection the horror of the business upon which they were traveling. But if so neither gave a sign. If either spoke it would be to make some commonplace remark, as:
“Ah-yah! I do believe I have been asleep! This dancing until four o’clock in the morning does use a fellow up confoundedly,” from Francis Tredegar; or:
“Quite a pretty little village this where we are stopping now,” from Alexander.
But not one word of the grave matter that occupied both minds.