“Very well, my friends,” he said. “And I am arrested on suspicion--of what?” “Of being an accursed Royalist in disguise,” answered the corporal gruffly. The stranger nodded to the soldier. “When the good cause triumphs,” said he, “it shall be remembered to your credit that you could recognise a gentleman through the trappings of a brigand.” “_Ah-hé s’il ne tient qu’à ça_!” replied the corporal briefly, with a sniff. “Before this sun sets there will be, perhaps, some hundreds of you gentry the fewer.” “My faith!” said the other, “and what a shortsighted policy: to post a cloud of educated witnesses to the skies, to testify in advance to your moral inefficiency!” They took him to the Cour des Feuillans--a yard neighbouring on that very spot where Ned, a day or two earlier, had had his _contretemps_ with Théroigne and her satellites. Here, thrust into an outbuilding that had been temporarily converted into a guard-room, he alighted upon many acquaintances in a like predicament. “Does it all read failure?” he whispered to a colossal creature beside him. This--also, presumably, a grenadier of the nation--was, in fact, the Abbé Bougon, an ecclesiastic of the Court, who wrote plays, yet had never conceived a situation one-half so dramatic as this in which he now found himself. “Hush!” murmured the giant. “Yes; the worst is to be feared.” By-and-by the prisoners were summoned, in order, to examination in an adjoining room. Long, however, before it came to the cool young stranger’s turn, a sound of growing uproar without the building had swelled to a thunder harsh and violent enough to ominously interfere, one might have thought, with the _procès-verbal_ within. The deep diapason of massed voices, the crisp clash of pikes, the flying of furious ejaculations--startling accents to the whole context of menace--assured him that here was evidence of such a counterbuff to palace intrigue as palace fatuity had never conceived might threaten it. Suddenly, in the midst of the tumult, he thought he heard his own name cried. “Suleau!” And again, “Scélérat! Imposteur!”