Having arranged eight o’clock at the Gare du Nord for the rendezvous next day, the detectives bid each other good-night and went their ways. CHAPTER XI MM. DUPIERRE ET CIE. The hands of the large clock at the Gare du Nord were pointing to three minutes before eight next morning as Inspector Burnley walked up the steps of the entrance. Lefarge was there before him and the two men greeted each other warmly. ‘I have a police box cart here,’ said Lefarge. ‘Give me your papers and we’ll have the cask out in a brace of shakes.’ Burnley handed them over and they went to the luggage bureau. Lefarge’s card had a magical effect, and in a very few minutes the sacking-covered barrel had been found and loaded on to the cart. Lefarge instructed the driver. ‘I want that taken to a street off the rue de la Convention at Grenelle. You might start now and stop at the Grenelle end of the Pont Mirabeau. Wait there until I come for you. I suppose it will take you an hour or more?’ ‘It’ll take more than an hour and a half, monsieur,’ replied the man. ‘It is a long way and this cart is very heavy.’ ‘Very well, just do the best you can.’ The man touched his cap and moved off with his load. ‘Are we in any hurry?’ asked Burnley. ‘No, we have to kill time until he gets there. Why do you ask?’ ‘Nothing, except that if we have time enough, let’s go down directly to the river and take a boat. I always enjoy the Seine boats.’ ‘As a matter of fact so do I,’ replied Lefarge. ‘You get the air and the motion is pleasanter and more silent than a bus. They are not so slow either when you consider the stops.’ They took a bus which brought them southwards through the Louvre, and, alighting at the Pont des Arts, caught a steamer going to Suresnes. The morning was fresh and exquisitely clear. The sun, immediately behind them at first, crept slowly round to the left as they followed the curve of the river. Burnley sat admiring perhaps for the fiftieth time the graceful architecture of the bridges, justly celebrated as the finest of any city in the world. He gazed with fresh interest and pleasure also on the buildings they were carried past, from the huge pile of the Louvre on the right bank to the great terrace of the Quai d’Orsay on the left, and from the Trocadero and the palaces of the Champs Élysées back to the thin tapering shaft of the Eiffel Tower. How well he remembered a visit that he and Lefarge had paid to the restaurant on the lower stage of this latter when they lunched at the next table to Madame Marcelle, the young and attractive looking woman who had murdered her English husband by repeated doses of a slow and irritant poison. He had just turned to remind his companion of the circumstance when the latter’s voice broke in on his thoughts.