When he came to himself he was in the tender hands of the police. They treated him very civilly however, told him they could wait while he changed his clothes, which had been soaked through and through by the heavy rain, and caused George, who was too much exhausted in mind and body to feel even his uncertainty about his wife except as a dull pain, to think kindly of the French allowance for “extenuating circumstances.” He was quite broken down, and, regardless of the shivering fits which seized him in rapid succession, was ready to go with them at once, only asking on what charge he was arrested. On learning that it was for murderous assault, he seemed scarcely enough master of himself to feel relieved that it was no worse; and when they added that it might be changed to a graver one if the injured man, who had been taken to a hospital, should die before the trial, George merely nodded without any sign of vivid interest. Indeed, if he had had complete command of his feelings and his wits, he would not have cared two straws whether Mr. Gurton lived or died. The sentence George had incurred would certainly at the best be a term of imprisonment, at the end of which, whether the period were long or short, Nouna would be as effectually lost to him as if he were already dead. George Lauriston was of the highly nervous, imaginative temperament to which ambition, hope, devotion are as the springs of life; when these were stopped or dried up, he became at once the withered husk of a man, a helpless log, not chafing at his confinement, not resigning himself to it, but living through the dull days like a brute, without emotion, almost without thought, weighed down by a leaden depression which threatened to end in the most fearful of all madness--a haunted melancholy. He learned without interest on the second day after his arrest that Mr. Gurton was dead. His formal appearance before the magistrate did him an unrecognised good, by rousing him out of his torpor into a strong sense of shame which bit into his very bones. To appear before a crowd, among whom were some of his Paris acquaintances, a prisoner, a social wreck, with every hope blighted, every honest ambition killed, was an ordeal for which he had to summon all his shaken manliness for one last gallant effort to show a stubborn face to fate. There was a worse experience before him. When he was brought into court to be formally committed for trial, the first faces he saw were those of Dicky Wood and Clarence Massey, the latter of whom wept like a child in open court, and was threatened with ejection for his repeated offers of bail to the extent of every penny he possessed. Lord Florencecourt was not present. It gave George a shock to hear that the charge against him was murder; the presence of his old comrades seemed to emphasise the gravity of the case, which he realised for the first time since his arrest. When asked if he had anything to say, he answered: “I am not guilty.