"I am Jerome de Greville. Claude told me of your coming, but I wished to make sure. We have examined your baggage," he went on frankly, unmindful of my ill-concealed disapproval, "but found nothing in the way of identification. You see," he apologized, "these things are necessary here, in affairs of this nature, if a fellow would preserve the proper connection between his head and his body." He rolled up his whiskers, laid aside a yellow wig, and I could see he was as Serigny had described. He was not as tall as I, but strongly built, and some two good years my senior. "Captain, if you will allow me I will take these traps of yours to our apartments. You lodge with me." I was nettled that I should have spoken so freely to a stranger, and felt ill-disposed to be pleasant, but he soon drove away any lingering animosity. When we had settled in our rooms, which adjoined, de Greville threw himself across his couch and said: "Look here, de Mouret, we have a hard task before us, and you may as well know it. M. de Serigny tells me he has instructed you himself, but details he would leave to me. What's your name?" "Placide," I replied as simply as a lad of ten. "Well, I'm Jerome. We are to stand together now, and men engaged in business like ours have no time for extra manners." His _bon camaraderie_ was contagious, and I gladly caught it. "Agreed, Jerome; so be it. Go on." "First we must locate our friend Carne Yvard, the very fiend of a fellow, who stops at nothing. Then to catch him with the papers, take them, cost what it will. For that work we have strong lads enough and true. Above all we must make no mistake when we strike, for if he scents our suspicions of him he'll whisk them off to Spain before you could bat your eye." I listened to him intently, yet enjoying to the utmost my prospective triumph. He went on: "Then there is that other fellow; we don't know who he is, the one that came over with you. He will probably exchange dispatches with Yvard, then off to the colonies again. There is not so much trouble about him, for he can be captured aboard ship. It is Yvard we want, and his dispatches." I said very quietly, still looking into the fire: "That much is already done." Jerome raised up on his elbow and stared at me as if he thought me mad. "I have taken those dispatches from your friend. Here they are." "The devil you have," he cried out, reaching the middle of the floor at a single bound. "How and when?" He would not leave off until I had related the whole of my adventure beginning with meeting the girl, and ending when I found him, at the inn. He was as happy as a school-boy, and laughed heartily at my being so readily made a victim of by the girl Florine. "Such tender doves to pluck she does not often find, and I warrant you she lets not many go so easily." I thought it unnecessary to tell him of my encounter with Yvard, only that I had found the packet where he dropped it.