“Look here, Frederick,” said he, very coldly, “I have full reason to mistrust you now; and before I take any step in this unfortunate matter, I must write to Berlin, and to your regiment, for the purpose of discovering the full extent of your misconduct. You will be good enough to consider yourself as under arrest here. I forbid you to leave your room under any pretext whatever. I will tell your step-mother that you are ill, and can see nobody, not even her, and I shall take good care that all our friends are left in ignorance of your presence here. And now leave me. I want to be alone. I will send for you when I want you.”
Frederick, thoroughly cowed by his father's manner, murmured some words of regret and explanation, but the general pointed toward the door, and he left his presence with a heavy heart.
Returning to the rooms to which Franz had conducted him on his arrival, he gave himself up to the gloomiest forebodings, and spent hours in gazing abstractedly out of the windows. His meals were brought him by Franz, whose feelings can more easily be imagined than described.
On the third day after his interview with his father, one of the Italian servants knocked at the door, and handed him a letter, which bore the Biala postmark, and which evidently had escaped the vigilance of both the general and of Franz. It was from Rose, and its contents agitated him beyond all measure. She wrote him that she had been subjected to the greatest indignity after his flight—in fact, treated like a mere common camp-follower—and had been turned out of the inn and driven from the village by the orders of the colonel. She added that, having but little money, she had not been able to proceed any farther than Biala, where she was now awaiting his instructions and remittances. She concluded by declaring that if after all she had suffered for his sake, he did not at once send a sufficient sum to enable her to leave the place and to return to Berlin, she would put an end to her days, having no intention to continue to live as she was doing now.
Frederick was nearly heart-broken. He had no funds, beyond a few lire notes, and, in his present position, no means of obtaining any except through his father. He therefore immediately wrote a few lines, which he sent to the general by Franz, entreating him to let him have at once a check for a couple of hundred thalers.
The general's reply was a decided refusal, and couched in such terms as to leave no glimmer of hope that he would relent in the matter.
Driven to desperation, Frederick turned over in his mind a hundred different schemes for raising the money he required, but he was forced to acknowledge to himself that each was more hare-brained than the other; and in the bitterness of his heart he ended by cursing the day he was born.
That night, after all the inmates of the villa had retired to rest, they were startled by several pistol-shots, and the sound of a violent scuffle in the general's library, on the ground floor. The general himself and several of the men-servants rushed to the spot from which the noise proceeded, and discovered Frederick, who, in his dressing-gown, stood near a shattered window, with a smoking revolver in his hand.
