Geoffrey'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 eventful days. The King had not come--that was the grim fact--the King had not come to claim his own; had left his honest gentlemen to fight or fall without him; and no one, even now, could tell how different the event might have been that day had George the Fifth but proved his own cause worth defending. Geoffrey, Dacre, none of them had had news of the King since the day of Aldershot. Up to the very stroke of noon, as Geoffrey remembered, Dacre had expected him. But they had waited in vain. And now the White Horse of Hanover, and with that the Norman Leopard, was a thing of the past. From his window Geoffrey could see the red, white, and green tricolor in the Tower yard. He inclined to think the King was dead. Geoffrey had never been by conviction a Legitimist; hardly even had he been one by affection. Dacre's magnetism, Dacre's nobility of purpose had overcome his earlier judgment; for the one effort he had lent his life to his friend, to stake on a cast of the die. Now that they had fairly thrown and lost, he returned to his former judgment. But with the cause that they had lost had gone his own future.