He was aware that his flight was the thing which his adherents most dreaded and which his enemies most desired.

Even if there had been serious personal risk in remaining, the occasion was one on which he ought to have thought it infamous to flinch: for the question was whether he and his posterity should reign on an ancestral throne or should be vagabonds and beggars.

But in his mind all other feelings had given place to a craven fear for his life.

To the earnest entreaties and unanswerable arguments of the agents whom his friends had sent to Rochester, he had only one answer.

His head was in danger.