“You know?” broke in the prisoner, uneasily. “You are mistaken. No one on earth has my confidence. Dispolsen has, it is true, my papers, and very important papers too. He went to Copenhagen, to the king, for me. I may even confess that I reckoned more surely upon him than upon any one else, for in the days of my prosperity I never did him a service.”
“Well, noble Count, I saw him to-day—”
“Your distress tells me the rest; he is a traitor.”
“He is dead.”
“Dead!”
The prisoner folded his arms and bent his head, then looking up at the young man, said: “I told you some good fortune must have befallen him!”
His eye turned to the wall, where the signs of his former grandeur hung, and he waved his hand, as if to dismiss the witness of a grief which he strove to conquer.
“I do not pity him; ’tis but one man the less. Nor do I pity myself; what have I to lose? But my daughter,—my unfortunate daughter! I shall be the victim of this infernal plot; and what is to become of her, if her father is taken from her?”
He turned quickly to Ordener. “How did he die? Where did you see him?”
“I saw him at the Spladgest. No one knows whether he died by suicide or by the hand of an assassin.”