n. Corporal Vinson, I am sorry to have to tell you that you are
under arrest."

"My God!" exclaimed the traitor. He attempted to rise, but fell back
on his seat: his eyes were staring at the handcuffs on his wrists! He
burst into tears.

Juve felt pity for this miserable being, huddled up there in the
depths of humiliation and terror. But the dreadful fact
remained--Vinson was a criminal, a traitor! Perhaps his errors were
due to a bad bringing-up, to deplorable examples, alas!... Juve was
not there to pass judgment, but to deliver the guilty wretch into the
hands of the authorities.

"Come now!" he said, tapping Vinson on the shoulder. "Come, we are
leaving for Paris!"

Corporal Vinson, traitor, raised supplicating eyes to Juve: then,
realising all resistance was vain, he rose painfully: he assumed an
air of indifference.

A policeman from Headquarters had joined Juve. The three men got into
an empty second-class compartment.

In a voice quivering with shame, Vinson begged Juve not to allow
anyone to enter. "I should be so ashamed," he muttered, with hanging
head and hunched shoulders.

"We shall do our best to prevent it," Juve assured him. After an
explanation with the station-master, the compartment was labelled
"_Reserved_."

The train started. Vinson was wide awake now, and dejected to the last
degree. After a hand-to-mouth existence, but still a free one, in
England, he had allowed himself to be nabbed by the police, like the
veriest simpleton! The papers would be full of it!

Vinson, who had been led into criminal ways by his love for a bad
woman, troubled himself much less regarding the punishment to be meted
out to him than about the dreadful distress his arrest would cause his
mother. The old Alsatian mother, when she learned that her son was in
prison charged with treason to France, would die of grief. Vinson
wished with all his heart that he had stuck to his first
decision--that he had killed himself rather than make confession to
the journalist, Jerome Fandor, who had wished to save him, and had
helped him to escape, but who had really done him a bad service,
since, deserter as he was, he had been caught like the most vulgar of
criminals!

The train stopped at a station.

"I am dying of thirst," mumbled Vinson.

Juve sent his second in command for a bottle of water from the
refreshment buffet.

Vinson thanked Juve with a grateful nod.

Refreshed, Vinson pulled his wits together.

Juv