door. Remember you will be held responsible to justice."

The porter shuddered, so did many of the passengers who had overheard
the Englishman's last words.

Justice! It is not to be trifled with anywhere, least of all in France,
where the uncomfortable superstition prevails that every one who can be
reasonably suspected of a crime is held to be guilty of that crime until
his innocence is clearly proved.

All those six passengers and the porter were now brought within the
category of the accused. They were all open to suspicion; they, and they
alone, for the murdered man had been seen alive at Laroche, and the fell
deed must have been done since then, while the train was in transit,
that is to say, going at express speed, when no one could leave it
except at peril of his life.

"Deuced awkward for us!" said the tall English general, Sir Charles
Collingham by name, to his brother the parson, when he had reëntered
their compartment and shut the door.

"I can't see it. In what way?" asked the Reverend Silas Collingham, a
typical English cleric, with a rubicund face and square-cut white
whiskers, dressed in a suit of black serge, and wearing the professional
white tie.

"Why, we shall be detained, of course; arrested, probably--certainly
detained. Examined, cross-examined, bully-ragged--I know something of
the French police and their ways."