“The man is mad,” he said to himself, with a shrug of his shoulders; “neither more nor less than mad to fling away his life and disgrace his name.  It is useless to think it will never be known; those stupid papers are sure to get hold of it, and then there is little chance of secrecy.”

He went about his work with a very unsettled, wretched expression on his shrewd face.  Something or other had evidently disturbed him very much.  While on his part John Smith, with the same light in his face and the same fire in his eyes, went off in the prison van.

He heard very little of what was going on around him.  He seemed to be quite apart in some dreamland, some world of his own.  When the coarse suit of prison clothes was brought to him, instead of the disgust the attendants expected to see, there came over his face a smile.  To himself he said:  “I could almost kiss them for her sweet sake.”

“That man is no thief,” said one of the warders.  “I do not care if they did catch him with the watch in his hand, he is no thief!  I know the stamp!”

How he passed that first day and night was best known to himself.  The jailer who brought his breakfast the next morning said, “You look tired.”

He smiled and said to himself, “I would have gone to death for her sweet sake!  This will be easy to bear.”

When that same morning dawned Mr. Forster was all impatience for his newspaper.  Twice he rang the bell and asked if it had come, and when the servant brought it up he looked at it eagerly.

“Give it to me quickly,” he said.  Then he opened it, and was soon engrossed in the contents.  Suddenly he flung it down, and almost stamped upon it in his rage.

“I knew it would be so!  Now it will be blazoned all over England!  What can have possessed him?”

The paragraph that excited his attention and anger ran as follows: 

“We are informed on good authority that the John Smith tried yesterday on the charge of stealing a watch is no less a person than Basil Carruthers, Esquire, the owner of Ulverston Priory, and head of one of the oldest families in England.”

“What can I do?” cried Mr. Forster; “it will break his mother’s heart; she can never forget it.  He is ruined for life.  For a lawyer, I am strangely unwilling to tell a lie; but it must be done!  He must be saved at any price!” He went to his desk and wrote the following note: 

     “To the Editor of ‘The Times’: 

“Sir:  I beg to call your attention to a paragraph that appears in ‘The Times’ of today stating that a man, tried under the name of John Smith for stealing a watch, is no less a person than Basil Carruthers, Esq., of Ulverston Priory.  As the solicitor of that family, and manager of the Ulverston property, I beg to contradict it.  Mr. Carruthers, himself, informed me of his intention to go abroad.  Without doubt his indignant denial will follow mine.  I am, sir, etc.,

     “Herbert Forster.”