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 CHAPTER XIV.

's jailers were lenient to him after that first day. He was removed to a room with carpet and furniture; his table was well served; he was allowed to walk about in the courtyards; books and pen and ink were given him—everything but newspapers. The fact was that Bagshaw felt he had gone too far. The vindictiveness, the cruelty of the populace, was already a thing of the past—of that past when they had not yet learned their power. The people were good-natured, impressionable, forgiving; and that low murmur from the street on the day of Dacre's execution, the third time the President had sought to make his prisoner betray the King, had well-nigh driven Bagshaw from his office. It was Richard Lincoln who had saved the government that day, by his stern rebuke to the President; the latter liked him none the better for that.

Geoffrey felt this change of sentiment in the manner of his keepers; and when he remembered that first terrible day, it was but to hope that his fears had been exaggerated. Undoubtedly John's sentence would be commuted to imprisonment like his own.

But the more convinced Geoffrey became of this, the more his mind turned to the other persons of those event-