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“I guess he is. Brig’s name?”

“The Lady Nepean.”

“Mail packet?”

“Yes, sir; leastways – ”

“Now, see here, Mister First Officer Colenso junior; it’s a shortish trip between this and the yard-arm, and it may save you some su-perfluous lying if I tell you that in August, last year, the Lady Nepean packet, Captain Colenso, outward bound for Halifax, met the Hitchcock privateer off the Great Bank of Newfoundland, and beat her off after two hours’ fighting. You were on board of her?”

“I tended the stern gun.”

“Very good. The next day, being still off the Banks, she fell in with Commodore Rodgers, of the United States frigate President, and surrendered to him right away.”

“We sank the mails.”

“You did, my man. Notwithstanding which, that lion-hearted hero treated you with the forbearance of a true-born son of freedom.” Captain Seccombe’s voice took an oratorical roll. “He saw that you were bleeding from your fray. He fed you at his hospitable board; he would not suffer you to be de-nuded of the least trifle. Nay, what did he promise? – but to send your father and his crew and passengers back to England in their own ship, on their swearing, upon their sacred honour, that she should return to Boston harbour with an equal number of American prisoners from England. Your father swore to that upon the Old and New Testaments, severally and conjointly; and the Lady Nepean sailed home for all the world like a lamb from the wolf’s jaws, with a single American officer inside of her. And how did your dog-damned Government respect this noble confidence? In a way, sir, that would have brought a blush to the cheek of a low-down attorney’s clerk. They re-pudiated. Under shelter of a notification that no exchange of prisoners on the high seas would count as valid, this perjured tyrant and his myrmidons went back on their captain’s oath, and kept the brig; and the American officer came home empty-handed. Your father was told to resume his duties, immortal souls being cheap in a country where they press seamen’s bodies. And now, Mister First Officer Colenso, perhaps you’ll explain how he had the impudence to come within two hundred miles of a coast where his name smelt worse than vermin.”

“He was coming back, sir.”

“Hey?”

“Back to Boston, sir. You see, Cap’n, father wasn’t a rich man, but he had saved a trifle. He didn’t go back to the service, though told that he might. It preyed on his mind. We was all very fond of father; being all one family, as you might say, though some of us had wives and families, and some were over to Redruth, to the mines.”

“Stick to the point.”

“But this is the point, Cap’n. He was coming back, you see. The Lady Nepean wasn’t fit for much after the handling she’d had. She was going for twelve hundred pounds: the Post Office didn’t look for more. We got her for eleven hundred, with the guns, and the repairs may have cost a hundred and fifty; but you’ll find the account-books in the cupboard there. Father had a matter of five hundred laid by, and a little over.”

Captain Seccombe removed his legs from the cabin-table, tilted his chair forward and half rose in his seat.

“You bought her?”

“That’s what I’m telling you, sir; though father’d have put it much clearer. You see, he laid it before the Lord; and then he laid it before all of us. It preyed on his mind. My sister Susannah stood up and she said, ‘I reckon I’m the most respectably married of all of you, having a farm of my own; but we can sell up, and all the world’s a home to them that fears the Lord. We can’t stock up with American prisoners, but we can go ourselves instead; and judging by the prisoners I’ve a-seen brought in, Commodore Rodgers’ll be glad to take us. What he does to us is the Lord’s affair.’ That’s what she said, sir. Of course, we kept it quiet: we put it about that the Lady Nepean was for Canada, and the whole family going out for emigrants. This here gentleman we picked up outside Falmouth; perhaps he’ve told you.”

Captain Seccombe stared at me, and I at Captain Seccombe. Reuben Colenso stood wringing his cap.

At length the American found breath enough to whistle. “I’ll have to put back to Boston about this, though it’s money out of pocket. This here’s a matter for Commodore Bainbridge. Take a seat, Mr. Colenso.”

“I was going to ask,” said the prisoner simply, “if, before you put me in irons, I might go on deck and look at father. It’ll be only a moment, sir.”

“Yes, sir, you may. And if you can get the ladies to excuse me, I will follow in a few minutes. I wish to pay him my respects. It’s my opinion,” he added pensively, as the prisoner left the cabin – “it’s my opinion that the man’s story is genu-wine.”

He repeated the word, five minutes later, as we stood on the quarter-deck beside the body. “A genu-wine man, sir, unless I am mistaken.”

Well, the question is one for casuists. In my travels I have learnt this, that men are greater than governments; wiser sometimes, honester always. Heaven deliver me from any such problem as killed this old packet-captain! Between loyalty to his king and loyalty to his conscience he had to choose, and it is likely enough that he erred. But I believe that he fought it out, and found on his country’s side a limit of shame to which he could not stoop. A man so placed, perhaps, may even betray his country to her honour. In this hope at least the flag which he had hauled down covered his body still as we committed it to the sea, its service or disservice done.

Two days later we anchored in the great harbour at Boston, where Captain Seccombe went with his story and his prisoners to Commodore Bainbridge, who kept them pending news of Commodore Rodgers. They were sent, a few weeks later, to Newport, Rhode Island, to be interrogated by that commander; and, to the honour of the Republic, were released on a liberal parole; but whether, when the war ended, they returned to England or took oath as American citizens, I have not learned. I was luckier. The Commodore allowed Captain Seccombe to detain me while the French consul made inquiry into my story; and during the two months which the consul thought fit to take over it, I was a guest in the captain’s house. And here I made my bow to Miss Amelia Seccombe, an accomplished young lady, “who,” said her doating father, “has acquired a considerable proficiency in French, and will be glad to swap ideas with you in that language.” Miss Seccombe and I did not hold our communications in French; and, observing her disposition to substitute the warmer language of the glances, I took the bull by the horns, told her my secret, and rhapsodised on Flora. Consequently no Nausicaa figures in this Odyssey of mine. Nay, the excellent girl flung herself into my cause, and bombarded her father and the consular office with such effect that on 2nd February 1814, I waved farewell to her from the deck of the barque Shawmut, bound from Boston to Bordeaux.

CHAPTER XXXV
IN PARIS. – ALAIN PLAYS HIS LAST CARD

On the 10th of March at sunset the Shawmut passed the Pointe de Grave fort and entered the mouth of the Gironde, and at eleven o’clock next morning dropped anchor a little below Blaye, under the guns of the Regulus, 74. We were just in time, a British fleet being daily expected there to co-operate with the Duc d’Angoulème and Count Lynch, who was then preparing to pull the tricolour from his shoulder and betray Bordeaux to Beresford, or, if you prefer it, to the Bourbon. News of his purpose had already travelled down to Blaye, and therefore no sooner were my feet once more on the soil of my beloved France, than I turned them towards Libourne, or rather Fronsac, and the morning after my arrival there, started for the capital.

But so desperately were the joints of travel dislocated (the war having deplenished the country alike of cattle and able-bodied drivers), and so frequent were the breakdowns by the way, that I might as expeditiously have trudged it. It cost me fifteen good days to reach Orleans, and at Étampes (which I reached on the morning of the 30th) the driver of the tottering diligence flatly declined to proceed. The Cossacks and Prussians were at the gates of Paris. “Last night we could see the fires of their bivouacs. If Monsieur listens he can hear the firing.” The Empress had fled from the Tuileries. “Whither?” The driver, the aubergiste, the disinterested crowd, shrugged their shoulders. “To Rambouillet, probably. God knew what was happening or what would happen.” The Emperor was at Troyes, or at Sens, or else as near as Fontainebleau; nobody knew for certain which. But the fugitives from Paris had been pouring in for days, and not a cart or four-footed beast was to be hired for love or money, though I hunted Étampes for hours.

At length, and at nightfall, I ran against a bow-kneed grey mare, and a cabriolet de place, which, by its label, belonged to Paris; the pair wandering the street under what it would be flattery to call the guidance of an eminently drunken driver. I boarded him; he dissolved at once into maudlin tears and prolixity. It appeared that on the 29th he had brought over a bourgeois family from the capital, and had spent the last three days in perambulating Étampes, and the past three nights in crapulous slumber within his vehicle. Here was my chance, and I demanded to know if for a price he would drive me back with him to Paris. He declared, still weeping, that he was fit for anything. “For my part, I am ready to die, and Monsieur knows that we shall never reach.”

“Still, anything is better than Étampes.”

For some inscrutable reason this struck him as excessively comic. He assured me that I was a brave fellow, and bade me jump up at once. Within five minutes we were jolting towards Paris. Our progress was all but inappreciable, for the grey mare had come to the end of her powers, and her master’s monologue kept pace with her. His anecdotes were all of the past three days. The iron of Étampes apparently had entered his soul and effaced all memory of his antecedent career. Of the war, of any recent public events, he could tell me nothing.

I had half expected – supposing the Emperor to be near Fontainebleau – to happen on his vedettes, but we had the road to ourselves, and reached Longjumeau a little before daybreak without having encountered a living creature. Here we knocked up the proprietor of a cabaret, who assured us between yawns that we were going to our doom, and after baiting the grey and dosing ourselves with execrable brandy, pushed forward again. As the sky grew pale about us, I had my ears alert for the sound of artillery. But Paris kept silence. We passed Sceaux, and arrived at length at Montrouge and the barrier. It was open – abandoned – not a sentry, not a douanier visible.

“Where will Monsieur be pleased to descend?” my driver inquired, and added, with an effort of memory, that he had a wife and two adorable children on a top floor in the Rue du Mont Parnasse, and stabled his mare handy by. I paid and watched him from the deserted pavement as he drove away. A small child came running from a doorway behind me, and blundered against my legs. I caught him by the collar and demanded what had happened to Paris. “That I do not know,” said the child, “but mamma is dressing herself to take me to the review. Tenez!” he pointed, and at the head of the long street I saw advancing the front rank of a blue-coated regiment of Prussians, marching across Paris to take up position on the Orleans road.

That was my answer. Paris had surrendered! And I had entered it from the south just in time, if I wished, to witness the entry of His Majesty the Emperor Alexander from the north. Soon I found myself one of a crowd converging towards the bridges, to scatter northward along the line of His Majesty’s progress, from the Barrière de Pantin to the Champs Élysées, where the grand review was to be held. I chose this for my objective, and, making my way along the Quays, found myself shortly before ten o’clock in the Place de la Concorde, where a singular little scene brought me to a halt.

About a score of young men – aristocrats by their dress and carriage – were gathered about the centre of the square. Each wore a white scarf and the Bourbon cockade in his hat; and their leader, a weedy youth with hay-coloured hair, had drawn a paper from his pocket and was declaiming its contents at the top of a voice by several sizes too big for him: —

“For Paris is reserved the privilege, under circumstances now existing, to accelerate the dawn of Universal Peace. Her suffrage is awaited with the interest which so immense a result naturally inspires,”

et cetera. Later on, I possessed myself of a copy of the Prince of Schwartzenberg’s proclamation, and identified the wooden rhetoric at once.

“Parisians! you have the example of Bordeaux before you”… Ay, by the Lord, they had – right under their eyes! The hay-coloured youth wound up his reading with a “Vive le Roi!” and his band of walking gentlemen took up the shout. The crowd looked on impassive; one or two edged away; and a grey-haired, soldierly horseman (whom I recognised for the Duc de Choiseul-Praslin) passing in full tenue of Colonel of the National Guard, reined up, and addressed the young men in a few words of grave rebuke. Two or three answered by snapping their fingers, and repeating their “Vive le Roi” with a kind of embarrassed defiance. But their performance, before so chilling an audience, was falling sadly flat when a dozen or more of young royalist bloods came riding up to reanimate it – among them, M. Louis de Chateaubriand, M. Talleyrand’s brother, Archambaut de Périgord, the scoundrelly Marquis de Maubreuil – yes, and my cousin, the Vicomte de Saint-Yves!

The indecency, the cynical and naked impudence of it, took me like a buffet. There, in a group of strangers, my cheek reddened under it, and for the moment I had a mind to run. I had done better to run. By a chance his eye missed mine as he swaggered past at a canter, for all the world like a tenore robusto on horseback, with the rouge on his face, and his air of expansive Olympian black-guardism. He carried a lace white handkerchief at the end of his riding switch, and this was bad enough. But as he wheeled his bay thoroughbred, I saw that he had followed the déclassé Maubreuil’s example and decorated the brute’s tail with a Cross of the Legion of Honour. That brought my teeth together, and I stood my ground.

“Vive le Roi!” “Vivent les Bourbons!” “À bas le sabot corse!” Maubreuil had brought a basketful of white brassards and cockades, and the gallant horsemen began to ride about and press them upon the unresponsive crowd. Alain held one of the badges at arm’s length as he pushed into the little group about me, and our eyes met.

“Merci,” said I, “retenez-le jusqu’à ce que nous nous rencontrions—Rue Grégoire de Tours!”

His arm with the riding switch and laced handkerchief went up as though he had been stung. Before it could descend, I darted aside deep into the crowd which hustled around him, understanding nothing, but none the less sullenly hostile. “A bas les cocardes blanches!” cried one or two. “Who was the cur?” I heard Maubreuil’s question as he pressed in to the rescue, and Alain’s reply, “Peste! A young relative of mine who is in a hurry to lose his head; whereas I prefer to choose the time for that.”

I took this for a splutter of hatred, and even found it laughable as I made my escape good. At the same time, our encounter had put me out of humour for gaping at the review, and I turned back and recrossed the river, to seek the Rue du Fouarre and the Widow Jupille.

Now the Rue du Fouarre, though once a very famous thoroughfare, is to-day perhaps as squalid as any that drains its refuse by a single gutter into the Seine, and the widow had been no beauty even in the days when she followed the 106th of the Line as vivandière and before she wedded Sergeant Jupille of that regiment. But she and I had struck up a friendship over a flesh-wound which I received in an affair of outposts on the Algueda, and thenceforward I taught myself to soften the edge of her white wine by the remembered virtues of her ointment, so that when Sergeant Jupille was cut off by a grapeshot in front of Salamanca, and his Philomène retired to take charge of his mother’s wine shop in the Rue du Fouarre, she had enrolled my name high on the list of her prospective patrons. I felt myself, so to speak, a part of the goodwill of her house, and “Heaven knows,” thought I, as I threaded the insalubrious street, “it is something for a soldier of the Empire to count even on this much in Paris to-day. Est aliquid, quocunque loco, quocunque sacello…”

Madame Jupille knew me at once, and we fell (figuratively speaking) upon each other’s neck. Her shop was empty, the whole quarter had trooped off to the review. After mingling our tears (again figuratively) over the fickleness of the capital, I inquired if she had any letters for me.

“Why, no, comrade.”

“None?” I exclaimed with a very blank face.

“Not one”; Madame Jupille eyed me archly, and relented. “The reason being that Mademoiselle is too discreet.”

“Ah!” I heaved a big sigh of relief. “You provoking woman, tell me what you mean by that?”

“Well, now, it may have been ten days ago that a stranger called in and asked if I had any news of the corporal who praised my white wine. ‘Have I any news,’ said I, ‘of a needle in a bundle of hay? They all praise it.’” (O, Madame Jupille!)

“’The corporal I’m speaking of,’ said he, ‘is or was called Champdivers.’ ‘Was!’ I cried, ‘you are not going to tell me he is dead?’ and I declare to you, comrade, the tears came into my eyes. ‘No, he is not,’ said the stranger, ’and the best proof is that he will be here inquiring for letters before long. You are to tell him that if he expects one from’ – see, I took the name down on a scrap of paper, and stuck it in a wine-glass here – ’from Miss Flora Gilchrist, he will do well to wait in Paris until a friend finds means to deliver it by hand. And if he asks more about me, say that I am from’ – tenez, I wrote the second name underneath – yes, that is it – ’Mr. Romaine.’”

“Confound his caution!” said I. “What sort of man was this messenger?”

“O, a staid-looking man, dark and civil-spoken. You might call him an upper servant, or perhaps a notary’s clerk; very plainly dressed, in black.”

“He spoke French?”

“Parfaitement. What else?”

“And he has not called again?”

“To be sure, yes, and the day before yesterday, and seemed quite disappointed. ‘Is there anything Monsieur would like to add to his message?’ I asked. ‘No,’ said he, ’or stay, tell him that all goes well in the north, but he must not leave Paris until I see him.’”

You may guess how I cursed Mr. Romaine for this beating about the bush. If all went well in the north, what possible excuse of caution could the man have for holding back Flora’s letter? And how, in any case, could it compromise me here in Paris? I had half a mind to take the bit in my teeth and post off at once for Calais. Still, there was the plain injunction, and the lawyer doubtless had a reason for it hidden somewhere behind his tiresome circumambulatory approaches. And his messenger might be back at any hour.

Therefore, though it went against the grain, I thought it prudent to take lodgings with Madame Jupille and possess my soul in patience. You will say that it should not have been difficult to kill time in Paris between the 31st of March and the 5th of April 1814. The entry of the Allies, Marmont’s supreme betrayal, the Emperor’s abdication, the Cossacks in the streets, the newspaper offices at work like hives under their new editors, and buzzing contradictory news from morning to night; a new rumour at every cafe, a scuffle, or the makings of one, at every street corner, and hour by hour a steady stream of manifestoes, placards, handbills, caricatures, and broadsheets of opprobrious verse – the din of it all went by me like the vain noises of a dream as I trod the pavements, intent upon my own hopes and perplexities. I cannot think that this was mere selfishness; rather, a deep disgust was weaning me from my country. If this Paris indeed were the reality, then was I the phantasm, the revenant; then was France – the France for which I had fought and my parents gone to the scaffold – a land that had never been, and our patriotism the shadow of a shade. Judge me not too hardly if in the restless, aimless perambulations of those five days I crossed the bridge between the country that held neither kin nor friends for me, but only my ineffectual past, and the country wherein one human creature, if only one, had use for my devotion.

On the sixth day – that is, April 5th – my patience broke down. I took my resolution over lunch and a bottle of Beaujolais, and walked straight back from the restaurant to my lodgings, where I asked Madame Jupille for pen, ink, and paper, and sat down to advertise Mr. Romaine that, for good or ill, he might expect me in London within twenty-four hours of the receipt of this letter.

I had scarce composed the first sentence, when there came a knock at the door and Madame Jupille announced that two gentlemen desired to see me. “Show them up,” said I, laying down my pen with a leaping heart; and in the doorway a moment later stood – my cousin Alain!

He was alone. He glanced with a grin of comprehension from me to the letter, advanced, set his hat on the table beside it, and his gloves (after blowing into them) beside his hat.

“My cousin,” said he, “you show astonishing agility from time to time; but on the whole you are damned easy to hunt.”

I had risen. “I take it you have pressing business to speak of, since amid your latest political occupations you have been at pains to seek me out. If so, I will ask you to be brief.”

“No pains at all,” he corrected affably. “I have known all the time that you were here. In fact, I expected you some while before you arrived, and sent my man, Paul, with a message.”

“A message?”

“Certainly – touching a letter from la belle Flora. You received it? The message, I mean.”

“Then it was not – ”

“No, decidedly it was not Mr. Romaine, to whom” – with another glance at the letter – “I perceive that you are writing for explanations. And since you are preparing to ask how on earth I traced you to this rather unsavoury den, permit me to inform you that a – b spells ‘ab,’ and that Bow Street, when on the track of a criminal, does not neglect to open his correspondence.”

I felt my hand tremble as it gripped the top rail of my chair, but I managed to command the voice to answer, coldly enough:

“One moment, Monsieur le Vicomte, before I do myself the pleasure of pitching you out of window. You have detained me these five days in Paris, and have done so, you give me to understand, by the simple expedient of a lie. So far, so good; will you do me the favour to complete the interesting self-exposure, and inform me of your reasons?”

“With all the pleasure in life. My plans were not ready, a little detail wanting, that is all. It is now supplied.” He took a chair, seated himself at the table, and drew a folded paper from his breast-pocket. “It will be news to you perhaps, that our uncle – our lamented uncle, if you choose – is dead these three weeks.”

“Rest his soul!”

“Forgive me if I stop short of that pious hope.” Alain hesitated, let his venom get the better of him, and spat out on his uncle’s memory an obscene curse which only betrayed the essential weakness of the man. Recovering himself, he went on: “I need not recall to you a certain scene (I confess too theatrical for my taste), arranged by the lawyer at his bedside; nor need I help you to an inkling of the contents of his last will. But possibly it may have slipped your memory that I gave Romaine fair warning. I promised him that I would raise the question of undue influence, and that I had my witnesses ready. I have added to them since; but I own to you that my case will be the stronger when you have obligingly signed the paper which I have the honour to submit to you.” And he tossed it, unopened, across the table.

I picked it up and unfolded it: – “I, the Viscount Anne de Kéroual de Saint-Yves, formerly serving under the name of Champdivers in the Buonapartist army, and later under that name a prisoner of war in the Castle of Edinburgh, hereby state that I had neither knowledge of my uncle the Count de Kéroual de Saint-Yves, nor expectations from him, nor was owned by him, until sought out by Mr. Daniel Romaine, in the Castle of Edinburgh, by him supplied with money to expedite my escape, and by him clandestinely smuggled at nightfall into Amersham Place; Further, that until that evening I had never set eyes on my uncle, nor have set eyes on him since; that he was bedridden when I saw him, and apparently in the last stage of senile decay. And I have reason to believe that Mr. Romaine did not fully inform him of the circumstances of my escape, and particularly of my concern in the death of a fellow-prisoner named Goguelat, formerly a maréchal des logis in the 22nd Regiment of the Line…”

Of the contents of this precious document let a sample suffice. From end to end it was a tissue of distorted statements implicated with dishonouring suggestions. I read it through, and let it drop on the table.

“I beg your pardon,” said I, “but what do you wish me to do with it?”

“Sign it,” said he.

I laughed. “Once more I beg your pardon, but though you have apparently dressed for it, this is not comic opera.”

“Nevertheless you will sign.”

“O, you weary me.” I seated myself, and flung a leg over the arm of my chair. “Shall we come to the alternative For I assume you have one.”

“The alternative, to be sure,” he answered cheerfully. “I have a companion below, one Clausel, and at the ‘Tête d’Or,’ a little way up the street, an escort of police.”

Here was a pleasing predicament. But if Alain had started with a chance of daunting me (which I do not admit), he had spoilt it long since by working on the raw of my temper. I kept a steady eye on him, and considered: and the longer I considered the better assured was I that his game must have a disastrously weak point somewhere, which it was my business to find.

“You have reminded me of your warning to Mr. Romaine. The subject is an ugly one for two of our family to touch upon; but do you happen to recall Mr. Romaine’s counter-threat?”

“Bluff! my young sir. It served his purpose for the moment, I grant you. I was unhinged. The indignity, the very monstrosity of it, the baselessness, staggered reason.”

“It was baseless, then?”

“The best proof is that in spite of his threat, and my open contempt and disregard of it, Mr. Romaine has not stirred a hand.”

“You mean that my uncle destroyed the evidence?”

“I mean nothing of the kind,” he retorted hotly, “for I deny that any such evidence at any time existed.”

I kept my eye on him. “Alain,” I said quietly, “you are a liar.”

A flush darkened his face beneath its cosmetics, and with an oath he dipped finger and thumb into his waistcoat pocket and pulled out a dog whistle. “No more of that,” said he, “or I whistle up the police this minute.”

“Well, well, let us resume the discussion. You say this man Clausel has denounced me?”

He nodded.

“Soldiers of the Empire are cheap in Paris just now.”

“So cheap that public opinion would be content if all the messieurs Champdivers were to kill all the messieurs Goguelat and be shot or guillotined for it. I forget which your case demands, and doubt if public opinion would inquire.”

“And yet,” I mused, “there must be preliminaries; some form of trial, for instance, with witnesses. It is even possible that I might be found innocent.”

“I have allowed for that unlikely chance, and I look beyond it. To be frank, it does not strike me as probable that a British jury will hand over the estates of the Comte de Kéroual de Saint-Yves to an escaped Buonapartist prisoner who has stood his trial for the murder of a comrade, and received the benefit of the doubt.”

“Allow me,” said I, “to open the window an inch or two. No; put back your whistle. I do not propose to fling you out, at least not just yet; nor will I try to escape. To tell you the truth, you suggest the need of a little fresh air. And now, Monsieur, you assure me you hold the knave in your hand. Well then, play him. Before I tear your foolish paper up, let me have a look at your confederate.” I stepped to the door and called down the stairs, “Madame Jupille, be so good as to ask my other visitor to ascend.”

With that I turned to the window again and stood there looking out upon the foul gutter along which the refuse of some dye-works at the head of the street found its way down to the Seine. And standing so, I heard the expected footsteps mounting the stairs.

“I must ask your pardon, Monsieur, for this intrusion – ”

“Hey!” If the words had been a charge of shot fired into my back, I could not have spun round on them more suddenly. “Mr. Romaine!”

For indeed it was he, and not Clausel, who stood in the doorway. And to this day I do not know if Alain or I stared at him with the blanker bewilderment; though I believe there was a significant difference in our complexions.

“M. le Vicomte,” said Romaine advancing, “recently effected an exchange. I have taken the liberty to effect another, and have left Mr. Clausel below listening to some arguments which are being addressed to him by Mr. Dudgeon, my confidential clerk. I think I may promise” – with a chuckle – “they will prove effectual. By your faces, gentlemen, I see that you regard my appearance as something in the nature of a miracle. Yet, M. le Vicomte at least should be guessing by this time that it is the simplest, most natural affair in the world. I engaged my word, sir, to have you watched. Will it be set down to more than ordinary astuteness that, finding you in negotiations for the exchange of the prisoner Clausel, we kept an eye upon him also? – that we followed him to Dover, and though unfortunate in missing the boat, reached Paris in time to watch the pair of you leave your lodgings this morning – nay, that knowing whither you were bound, we reached the Rue du Fouarre in time to watch you making your dispositions? But I run on too fast. Mr. Anne, I am entrusted with a letter for you. When, with Mr. Alain’s permission, you have read it, we will resume our little conversation.”