I knew, and I felt keenly about it, that I had accepted a bribe to perform an illicit service. I had posed as a medical man and given a certificate of death. But my one and only object in life was to see Mr. De Gex and demand of him a full explanation of the amazing and suspicious circumstances. My lapses were intermittent. At times I was fully conscious of the past. At others my brain was awhirl and aflame. I could think of nothing, see nothing--only distorted visions of things about me. Apparently twenty-four hours had passed since I walked in the sunshine. The men in the hospital ward were all Frenchmen, apparently of the lower class. At one end of the room a heated argument was in progress in which four or five men were gesticulating and wrangling, while one man was seated on his bed laughing idiotically, it seemed, at his own thoughts. Presently a tall thin man in spectacles entered, and addressing me, asked me to follow him. I obeyed, and he conducted me to a small kind of office in which two men were standing. Both were middle-aged, and of official aspect. Having given me a chair they all seated themselves when the thin man--who I rightly judged to be the director of the hospital--commenced to interrogate me. "How do you feel to-day?" was his first question, which he put in French in a quiet, kindly manner. "I feel much better," was my reply. "But yesterday my nurse revealed to me some very extraordinary facts concerning myself." "Yes. You have been seriously ill," he said. "But now you are better these gentlemen wish to put a few questions to you." "They are police officers, I presume." The director nodded in the affirmative. "We wish to ascertain exactly what happened to you, monsieur," exclaimed the elder of the pair. "I really don't know," I replied. "I must have lost all consciousness in London, and----" "In London!" exclaimed Monsieur Leullier, the Prefect of Police, in great surprise. "Then how came you here in St. Malo?" "I have not the slightest idea," was my reply. "I only presume that I was found here." "You were. A fish-porter passing along the Quay St. Vincent at about two o'clock in the morning found you seated on the ground with your back to the wall, moaning as though in pain. He called the police and you were removed on the ambulance to the hospital here. The doctors found that you were in no pain, but that you could give no intelligible account of yourself." "What did I tell them?" "Oh! a number of silly stories. At one moment you said you had come from Italy. Then you said that you had hired a motor-car and the driver had attacked you in the night. Afterwards you believed yourself to be in some office, and talked about electrical engineering." "That is my profession," I said. And I told them my name and my address in London, facts which the police carefully set down.