While Lady Le Breton was thus communing with herself in the breakfast-room, and while Herbert was trying to patch up a hollow truce with his own much-bruised self-respect in his own bedroom, Ronald was taking poor dazed and wearied Selah round to the refuge of the Baumanns' hospitable roof. As soon as that matter was temporarily arranged to the mutual satisfaction of all the parties concerned, Ronald walked over alone to Ernest's little lodgings at Holloway. He would sleep there that night, and send round a letter to Amelia, the housemaid, in the morning, asking her to pack up his things and forward them at once to Mrs. Halliss's. For himself, he did not propose, unless circumstances compelled it, again to enter his mother's rooms, except by her own express invitation. After all, he thought, even his little income, if clubbed with Edie and Ernest's, would probably help them all to live now in tolerable comfort. So he told Edie all his story, and Edie listened to it with an approving smile. 'I think, dear Ronald,' she said, taking his hand in hers, 'you did quite right--quite as Ernest himself would have done under the circumstances.' 'Where's Ernest?' asked Ronald, half smiling at that naive wifely standard of right conduct. 'Gone with Mr. Berkeley to the trial,' Edie answered. 'The trial! What trial?' 'Oh, don't you know? Herr Max's. They're trying him to-day for littering a seditious libel and inciting to murder the chief of the Third Section at St. Petersburg.' 'But he said nothing at all,' Ronald cried in astonishment. 'I read the article myself. He said nothing that any Englishman mightn't have said under the same circumstances. Why, I could have written the libel, as they call it, myself, even, and I'm not much of a politician either! They can't ever be trying him in a country like England for anything so ridiculously little as that!' 'But they are,' Edie answered quietly; 'and dear Ernest's dreadfully afraid the verdict will go against him.' 'Nonsense,' Ronald answered with natural confidence. 'No English jury would ever convict a man for speaking up like that against an odious and abominable tyranny.' Very late in the afternoon, Ernest and Berkeley returned to the lodgings. Ernest's face was white with excitement, and his lips were trembling violently with suppressed emotion. His eyes were red and swollen. Edie hardly needed to ask in a breathless whisper of Arthur Berkeley, 'What verdict?' 'Guilty,' Arthur Berkeley answered with a look of unfeigned horror and indignation. He had learnt by this time quite to take the communistic view of such questions. 'Guilty,' Ronald cried, jumping up from his chair in astonishment. 'Impossible! And what sentence?' 'Twelve months' hard labour,' Berkeley answered, slowly and remorsefully. 'An atrocious sentence!' Ronald exclaimed, turning red with excitement. 'An abominable sentence! A most malignant and vindictive sentence! Who was the judge, Arthur?'