table.

All night my dreams were of the prisoner. I was seeking him in the gloom of
the upper rooms, or amid the dusky mazes of the leafless
plantations--always seeing him afar off, never overtaking him, and trying
in vain to catch a glimpse of his features. But his face was always turned
from me.

My first words on waking, were to ask if he had yet come. All day long I
was waiting, and watching, and listening for him, starting up at every
sound, and continually running to the window. Would he be young and
handsome? Or would he be old, and white-haired, and world-forgotten, like
some of those Bastille prisoners I had heard my father speak of? Would his
chains rattle when he walked about? I asked myself these questions, and
answered them as my childish imagination prompted, a hundred times a day;
and still he came not.

So another twenty-four hours went by, and my impatience was almost
beginning to wear itself out, when at last, about five o'clock in the
afternoon of the third day, it being already quite dark, there came a
sudden clanging of the gates, followed by a rattle of wheels in the
courtyard, and a hurrying to and fro of feet upon the stairs.

Then, listening with a beating heart, but seeing nothing, I knew that he
was come.

I had to sleep that night with my curiosity ungratified; for my father had
hurried away at the first sounds from without, nor came back till long
after I had been carried off to bed by my Rhenish handmaiden.