The man, on the other hand, had only his worst feelings intensified by misfortune which he could not but look upon as unmerited. George’s love for his wife remained as strong as ever, but it was now the one soft spot in a nature rapidly hardening under the influence of a struggle with fortune in which he had been signally worsted. In the long hours of the night, when his cough kept him awake even though he was tired out by a hard day’s labour, he brooded over the wrongs he had suffered, until the canker of disappointment ate into his heart and bred there a burning, murderous wish for revenge: not upon the French law which had condemned him, as he maintained, unjustly--that was impersonal, intangible, a windmill to fight; not upon the Colonel, who had faltered in his friendship; not upon Chloris, whose mischievous caprice had set in motion the force which had indirectly destroyed him; but a man’s indignant righteous revenge upon the rascal who had tried from his very wedding-day to come between him and his wife. George began to feel that it was even more for the sake of finding Rahas than of meeting Nouna again that he yearned with a sick man’s longing to live until the time of his release, and prayed for strength to drag on an existence which with its hopelessness and its morbid cravings for the savage excitement of vengeance, was an infernal torment which told, by its intensity, on his waning strength. The prison authorities noticed the change in him, and treated him with what little consideration was possible. The old priest, in particular, stirred by the fact that “number 42” was a heretic into giving him something better than the conventional doses of religious advice which he administered to the devotees of “the true Church,” proved a most kind friend to him, and it was with a manner of sincere and warm sympathy that the good father while paying him his usual visit one day in April, let fall at parting a mysterious whisper about good news and good friends who had not forgotten him. The brooding prisoner hardly heeded him. But next morning he was brought up before the governor, and a paper was formally read out to him, in which he was informed that the Minister of the Interior, on having brought under his notice the case of the Englishman, George Lauriston, now undergoing a sentence of penal servitude at Toulon, had come to the conclusion that the said sentence was unduly severe, and that, as the evidence went to show that the crime was unpremeditated, and committed under strong provocation, a short term of imprisonment would have been adequate punishment, and that, in view of the fact that the said George Lauriston had been already at Toulon working as a convict for nearly four months, the Minister had decided to remit the remainder of the allotted term of imprisonment. George listened, but he hardly understood; the governor, in a few kindly words, then told him that he was a free man, that he could go back to his friends.