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in view of the Importance of the Establishment into which I had broken, bail could not be granted.
     
    All went well in gaol. I won’t pretend I enjoyed it; but if a man is to live his life to the full, he must expect occasional loss of liberty, be it in cell or hospital bed. For the first five days I was treated genially as if it were a foregone conclusion that my behaviour could be satisfactorily explained. Then came a subtle change in the attitude of my warders.
     
    I thought I must have broken some taboo. Had my normal social gaiety been mistaken, I wondered, for insolence? In so ancient and traditional a country as England there is a proper manner for every situation, and one knows it or should know it by instinct. In the Tower, for example, I find that a distant courtliness, a melancholy humour are much appreciated. But in a plain, respectable prison the right note for a first offender was hard to strike, especially since I was accustomed to conditions in the less formal countries of Latin America. There a prisoner is free to chat, to cook his food if he can get any, to catch his own lice and to pass the time as best he can in the easy society of well-mannered thieves and murderers. I have never been able to understand why Victorian England decided that confinement in a cell was more progressive.
     
    The disapproval of my warders, however, had nothing to do with any traditional subtleties of behaviour. No, their inexplicable coldness merely showed that they had learned through the police grapevine of the enormity of my crime. Myself, I never suspected it. I had not even employed a solicitor to advise and defend me. I felt that the complexities were such that only I myself could be sure what to admit and what to suppress. In gaol I had had plenty of time to think, and it had occurred to me that the manor, as I had pictured it, did not fit the social habits of its day. The horde of maidservants, passing from the domestic offices to their attic bedrooms, would have to go up the main staircase, which was most improbable. The likely answer was that the Ministry had blocked up the western ends of the landings on the first and second floors to form the nunnery wing, that the nunnery stairs had originally been the back stairs and that they carried on up to the attics at some point which I had not discovered in the dark. If my father had been thinking of this second staircase - I repeat that I always had the utmost confidence in what he chose to tell me - then his nest-egg might still be where he said it was and I still had a hope of regaining it. Obviously I did not want any solicitor insisting that I should produce it and prove my title to it.
     
    The magistrates’ court was crowded. I had a good look round from the dock. Peter and Horace were both present, and at a decent distance from them was Dr Cornelia Ridgeway. She was sternly dressed, as befitted a scientist, and a man without my keen appreciation of women might have had to take a second look before realizing that when she wished - in her bedroom or in Bond Street, for example — she could be alluringly feminine. As my acquaintance with her had been purely spiritual - or, let us say, spiritually tactile rather than coarsely visual - I might not have recognized her; but, when our eyes met, she produced a scintillating, exquisite, gorgeous carnation of a blush. There was also a tremor of the lips. I think she may have intended a distant smile, a mere politeness to show that she was above embarrassment. But I had, of course, to look away.
     
    The case for the prosecution opened. Peter gave evidence and very wisely kept Horace right out of the story. So did Dr Cornelia. I had passed through her room and woken her up. She had screamed for help. That was all she knew. As she left the box, modest, serious and glowing with the inner consciousness that she had aroused the chivalrous admiration of every man of taste in court, I was able to express my apologies in a