A large crowd had assembled at Gare St. Lazare to witness the arrival of the special with the passengers who had travelled in our ill-fated train. Now that I had collected my scattered thoughts once more I was resolved at the earliest possible moment to inform Lady Fitzgraham of the discovery I had made, for I had come to the firm conclusion that some, at any rate, of the jewellery that bag contained must be hers, some of the jewellery which had been stolen on board the boat. Upon our arrival at the "Continental" I discovered that Gastrell and Connie Stapleton's friends numbered no less than twelve, without counting Lady Fitzgraham or myself, so that in all we were sixteen. Of the people I had met before, whom I believed to be members of the gang, only Jasmine Gastrell was absent. What most puzzled me was what the reason could be they had all come to Paris. Did the London police suspect them, and were they fleeing from justice in consequence? That, I decided, seemed hardly likely. Could they be contemplating some _coup_ on the Continent, or had they come over to prepare with greater security some fresh gigantic robbery in England? That seemed far more probable, and just then I remembered that in less than a fortnight the coming-of-age festivities of Lord Cranmere's son would begin—February the 28th. What complicated matters to some extent was that I had no means of ascertaining beyond doubt which members of this large party were actually members of the gang I now knew to exist, and which, if any, besides Dulcie, Lady Fitzgraham, and myself, also, I fancied, the man named Wollaston, were honest folk, some of them possibly dupes. Lady Fitzgraham I knew well by name and repute, and there could be no possibility of her being mixed up in criminal or even shady transactions. That the robbery of her famous jewels, by whomsoever it had been committed, had been premeditated and carefully planned, there seemed hardly room to doubt. Next day all the Paris newspapers contained reports of the suicide—as they evidently all believed it to have been—and of the robbery on board the boat. The usual theories, many of them so far-fetched as to be almost fantastic, were advanced, and all kinds of wild suggestions were made to account for the dead man's having been disguised. Not until three days later was the sensational announcement made in the newspapers that he had proved to be George Preston, the famous English detective, who had retired upon pension only the year before.