Something or other had evidently disturbed him very much.
While on his part John Smith, with the same light in his face and the
same fire in his eyes, went off in the prison van.
He heard very little of what was going on around him. He seemed to be
quite apart in some dreamland, some world of his own. When the coarse
suit of prison clothes was brought to him, instead of the disgust the
attendants expected to see, there came over his face a smile. To himself
he said: "I could almost kiss them for her sweet sake."
"That man is no thief," said one of the warders. "I do not care if they
did catch him with the watch in his hand, he is no thief! I know the
stamp!"
How he passed that first day and night was best known to himself. The
jailer who brought his breakfast the next morning said, "You look
tired."
He smiled and said to himself, "I would have gone to death for her sweet
sake! This will be easy to bear."
When that same morning dawned Mr. Forster was all impatience for his
newspaper. Twice he rang the bell and asked if it had come, and when the
servant brought it up he looked at it eagerly.
"Give it to me quickly," he said. Then he opened it, and was soon
engrossed in the contents. Suddenly he flung it down, and almost stamped
upon it in his rage.
"I knew it would be so! Now it will be blazoned all over England! What
can have possessed him?"
The paragraph that excited his attention and anger ran as follows:
"We are informed on good authority that the John Smith tried yesterday
on the charge of stealing a watch is no less a person than Basil
Carruthers, Esquire, the owner of Ulverston Priory, and head of one of
the oldest families in England.
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