Prince Dolor fell into a kind of swoon of utter misery, bewilderment, and exhaustion, and when he awoke he found himself in his own room--alone and quiet--with the dawn just breaking, and the long rim of yellow light in the horizon glimmering through the window-panes. CHAPTER IX When Prince Dolor sat up in bed, trying to remember where he was, whither he had been, and what he had seen the day before, he perceived that his room was empty. Generally his nurse rather worried him by breaking his slumbers, coming in and “setting things to rights,” as she called it. Now the dust lay thick upon chairs and tables; there was no harsh voice heard to scold him for not getting up immediately, which, I am sorry to say, this boy did not always do. For he so enjoyed lying still, and thinking lazily about everything or nothing, that, if he had not tried hard against it, he would certainly have become like those celebrated “Two little men Who lay in their bed till the clock struck ten.” It was striking ten now, and still no nurse was to be seen. He was rather relieved at first, for he felt so tired; and besides, when he stretched out his arm, he found to his dismay that he had gone to bed in his clothes. Very uncomfortable he felt, of course; and just a little frightened. Especially when he began to call and call again, but nobody answered. Often he used to think how nice it would be to get rid of his nurse and live in this tower all by himself--like a sort of monarch able to do everything he liked, and leave undone all that he did not want to do; but now that this seemed really to have happened, he did not like it at all. “Nurse,--dear nurse,--please come back!” he called out. “Come back, and I will be the best boy in all the land.” And when she did not come back, and nothing but silence answered his lamentable call, he very nearly began to cry. “This won't do,” he said at last, dashing the tears from his eyes. “It's just like a baby, and I'm a big boy--shall be a man some day. What has happened, I wonder? I'll go and see.” He sprang out of bed,--not to his feet, alas! but to his poor little weak knees, and crawled on them from room to room. All the four chambers were deserted--not forlorn or untidy, for everything seemed to have been done for his comfort--the breakfast and dinner things were laid, the food spread in order. He might live “like a prince,” as the proverb is, for several days. But the place was entirely forsaken--there was evidently not a creature but himself in the solitary tower. A great fear came upon the poor boy. Lonely as his life had been, he had never known what it was to be absolutely alone. A kind of despair seized him--no violent anger or terror, but a sort of patient desolation. “What in the world am I to do?” thought he, and sat down in the middle of the floor, half inclined to believe that it would be better to give up entirely, lay himself down, and die.