certificate will, you will find, open every gate to you.
Good-night, citizen. A demain."

"Good-night."

Armand's slim figure disappeared in the gloom. Chauvelin watched him for
a few moments until even his footsteps had died away in the distance;
then he turned back towards Heron's lodgings.

"A nous deux," he muttered between tightly clenched teeth; "a nous deux
once more, my enigmatical Scarlet Pimpernel."

CHAPTER XXI. BACK TO PARIS

It was an exceptionally dark night, and the rain was falling in
torrents. Sir Andrew Ffoulkes, wrapped in a piece of sacking, had taken
shelter right underneath the coal-cart; even then he was getting wet
through to the skin.

He had worked hard for two days coal-heaving, and the night before he
had found a cheap, squalid lodging where at any rate he was protected
from the inclemencies of the weather; but to-night he was expecting
Blakeney at the appointed hour and place. He had secured a cart of the
ordinary ramshackle pattern used for carrying coal. Unfortunately there
were no covered ones to be obtained in the neighbourhood, and equally
unfortunately the thaw had set in with a blustering wind and diving
rain, which made waiting in the open air for hours at a stretch and in
complete darkness excessively unpleasant.

But for all these discomforts Sir Andrew Ffoulkes cared not one jot. In
England, in his magnificent Suffolk home, he was a confirmed sybarite,
in whose service every description of comfort and luxury had to
be enrolled. Here tonight in the rough and tattered clothes of a
coal-heaver, drenched to the skin, and crouching under the body of
a cart that hardly sheltered him from the rain, he was as happy as a
schoolboy out for a holiday.

Happy, but vaguely anxious.

He had no means of ascertaining the time. So many of the church-bells
and clock towers had been silenced recently that not one of those
welcome sounds penetrated to the dreary desolation of this canal wharf,
with its abandoned carts standing ghostlike in a row. Darkness had set
in very early in the afternoon, and the heavers had given up work soon
after four o'clock.

For about an hour after that a certain animation had still reigned round
the wharf, men crossing and going, one or two of the barges moving in or
out alongside the quay. But for some time now darkness and silence had
been the masters in this desolate spot, and that time had seemed to Sir
Andrew an eternity. He had hobbled and tethered