A desolate feeling came over me; for the first and only time this night, the thought occurred to me that perhaps after all I had better make my escape. Who was to prevent me? Assuredly not the slippered hero at my side; and as little the old night-watchman Rüterbusch, who was shuffling up and down the hall, in front of his sentry-box, in the dim light of a lantern that swung from the vaulted roof. But I thought of my father, and wondered if his conscience would not smite him when he heard the next morning that I was in prison; and so I stood quietly by and heard the night-watchman Rüterbusch explaining to Justizrath Heckepfennig that the matter would be very hard to manage, since the last few days so many arrests had been made, that the guard-house was completely full. The guard-house was a forbidding-looking appendage to the _Rathhaus_, and fronted on an extremely narrow alley in which footsteps always made a peculiar echo. No townsman who could avoid it ever went through this echoing alley; for that gloomy appendage to the _Rathhaus_ had no door, but a row of small square windows secured with iron bars and half-closed with wooden screens, and behind them here and there might be seen a pale, woe-begone face. A quarter of an hour after the conversation between Herr Justizrath Heckepfennig and night-watchman Rüterbusch had come to a satisfactory conclusion, I was sitting behind one of these grated windows. PART SECOND. CHAPTER I.