Breakfast over, Ralph stretched his feet for a few moments before the fire. Budda talked on; but Ralph said nothing. He sprang to his feet at length and got on his hat and overcoat, while his mother and Ruth were out of the room.
"Now I am ready," he said; and Budda at once led the way.
He met his mother and sister in the passage and kissed them a hurried good-morning, and almost before they knew what had happened the door closed, and Ralph and the policeman had disappeared.
On the following morning he was brought before the magistrates and remanded for a week, bail being refused.
It was fortunate for him that in the solitude of his cell he had no conception of the tremendous sensation his arrest produced. There had been nothing like it in St. Goram for more than a generation, and for a week or two little else was talked about.
Of course, opinions varied as to the measure of his guilt or innocence. But, in the main, the current of opinion went strongly against him. When a man is down, it is surprising how few his friends are. The bulk of the St. Goramites were far more ready to kick him than defend him. Wiseacres and busybodies told all who cared to listen how they had predicted some such catastrophe. David Penlogan was a good man, but he had not trained his children wisely. He had spent more on their education than his circumstances warranted, with the result that they were exclusive and proud, and discontented with the station in life to which Providence had called them.
Ralph would have been infinitely pained had he known how indifferent the mass of the people were to his fate, and how ready some of those whom he had regarded as his friends were to listen to tales against him. Even those who defended him, did it in a very tepid and half-hearted way; and the more strongly the current ran against him, the more feeble became his defence.
At the end of a week Ralph was brought up and remanded again. Sir John Hamblyn was still confined to his bed, and the doctor could not say when he would be well enough to appear and give evidence.
So time after time he was dragged into the dock, only to be hustled after a few minutes back into his cell.
But at length, after weary weeks of waiting, Sir John appeared at the court-house with his arm in a sling. The bench was crowded with magistrates, all of whom were loud in their expressions of sympathy and emphatic in their denunciation of the crime that had been committed.