rl, saying openly and impudently
that he preferred the society of honest old soldiers to such a crew as
ours. L'Echelle, still sitting on the hedge, as I fancied, got in with
the Colonel and his escort.

On reaching Aix-les-Bains, we found the omnibus that did the _service
de la ville_, but the Colonel refused to enter it, and declared he
would walk; he cared nothing for the degradation of appearing in the
public streets as a prisoner marching between a couple of gendarmes.
He gloried in it, he said; his desire was clearly to turn the whole
thing into ridicule, and the passers-by laughed aloud at this
well-dressed gentleman, as he strutted along with his hat cocked, one
hand on his hip, the other placed familiarly on the sergeant's arm.

He met some friends, too,--one was a person rather like himself, with
the same swaggering high-handed air, who accosted him as we were
passing the corner of the square just by the Hotel d'Aix.

"What ho! Basil my boy!" cried the stranger. "In chokey? Took up by
the police? What've you done? Robbed a church?"

"Come on with us and you'll soon know. No, really, come along, I may
want you. I'm going before the beak and may want a witness as to
character."

"Right oh! There are some more of us here from the old shop--Jack
Tyrrell, Bobus Smith--all Mars and Neptune men. They'll speak for a
pal at a pinch. Where shall we come?"

"To the town hall, the _mairie_," replied the Colonel, after a brief
reference to his escort. "I've got a particular appointment there with
Monsieur le Commissaire, and the Right Honourable the Earl of
Blackadder."

"Oh! that noble sportsman? What's wrong with him? What's he been
doing to you or you to him?"

"I punched his head, that's all."

"No doubt he deserved it; anyhow, Charlie Forrester will be pleased.
By-by, you'll see me again, and all the chaps I can pick up at the
Cercle and the hotels near."

Then our procession passed on, the Colonel and gendarmes leading,
Tiler and I with l'Echelle close behind.

We found my lord awaiting us. He had driven on ahead in a _fiacre_ and
was standing alone at the entrance to the police office, which is
situated on the ground floor of the Hotel de Ville, a pretty
old-fashioned building of gray stone just facing the Etablissement
Thermale, the home of the far-famed baths from which _Aix-les-Bains_
takes its name.

"In here?" asked my lord; and with a brief wave of his hand he would
have passed in first, but t