A sudden chill seized him and his heart seemed to become encased in stone. When a heavy man falls, striking his head on the way to the ground--oh, but nonsense, he should have seen, have known what he had done; he should have realised--What? George left a blank there which he could not fill. The possibility suggested by the sight of that swaying, excited mob, thronging, gesticulating fifty yards in front of him, with morbidly eager faces all upturned towards the windows of the first floor, where the bank was established, was too ghastly, too awful. He tried to laugh at himself for entertaining an idea so fanciful, so ridiculous, but the crowd fascinated him; he could not turn away without--Ah, yes, by going nearer, by joining the stream of people that was still flowing rapidly in that direction, he might learn what sort of a story they had got hold of. The murmurs grew louder as he got deeper and deeper in the throng, until, when he was well wedged in a feverishly eager phalanx of horror-mongers against whom the few _gendarmes_ present were altogether powerless, his curiosity was satisfied to the full, for the story bandied from mouth to mouth was very definite indeed. A foreigner--English or German, it was not certain which, had had a quarrel with his employer, some said about a woman, some said about money, and had murdered him and escaped. Every version of the tale, however they might differ as to other details, contained the two last items--the murder and the escape of the murderer. George stayed deliberately, looked mechanically up at the windows with the rest of the crowd, and gathering in every different turn of the story, with strained keenness of hearing, hoping desperately to hear some one, brighter-witted and better-informed than the rest, contradict the spreading report and mock at the exaggerations of the herd. The moments dragged on; they were expecting a force of _gendarmes_, and the excitement increased. George, unable to move in the dense mass, was in a state of frenzied defiance of the crowd’s surmises, when a quick turn of every head to the left, and hoarse cry “_Les voilà, les voilà_,” told him that the police were coming, and the next instant he was being borne off, a helpless unit in the surging crowd as it retreated before the advancing _gendarmes_. Struggling to work his way out of the crush of people when free movement became possible, George stumbled against one of the _gendarmes_ who had been waiting for assistance to disperse the mob. He was a slim man, scarcely of middle height, and it was he, and not the stalwart young Englishman, who suffered in the collision, staggering a step or two with an oath. But George shrank back with a great shock. If that ugly rumour should have any touch of truth, then his relation to the little slim man was already that of the hare to the hound, and the start would not be long delayed.