An indescribable footpath wound through an inextricable labyrinth, sometimes as thorny as a heath, sometimes as miry as a marsh.

The night was very dark.

From time to time, far away in the darkness, they could hear a dog bark.  The smuggler then made bends or zigzags, turned sharply to the right or to the left, and sometimes retraced his steps.

Cournet, jumping hedges, striding over ditches, stumbling at every moment, slipping into sloughs, laying hold of briers, with his clothes in rags, his hands bleeding, dying with hunger, battered about, wearied, worn out, almost exhausted, followed his guide gaily.

At every minute he made a false step; he fell into every bog, and got up covered with mud.  At length he fell into a pond.  It was several feet deep.  This washed him.

“Bravo!” he said.  “I am very clean, but I am very cold.”

At four o’clock in the morning, as Henry had promised him, they reached Messine, a Belgian village.  The two Custom House lines had been cleared.  Cournet had nothing more to fear, either from the Custom House nor from the coup d’etat, neither from men nor from dogs.

He gave Henry the second fifty francs, and continued his journey on foot, trusting somewhat to chance.

It was not until towards evening that he reached a railway station.  He got into a train, and at nightfall he arrived at the Southern Railway Station at Brussels.

He had left Paris on the preceding morning, had not slept an hour, had been walking all night, and had eaten nothing.  On searching in his pocket he missed his pocket book, but found a crust of bread.  He was more delighted at the discovery of the crust than grieved at the loss of his pocket-book.  He carried his money in a waistband; the pocket-book, which had probably disappeared in the pond, contained his letters, and amongst others an exceedingly useful letter of introduction from his friend M. Ernest Koechlin, to the Representatives Guilgot and Carlos Forel, who at that moment were refugees at Brussels, and lodged at the Hotel de Brabant.

On leaving the railway station he threw himself into a cab, and said to the coachman,—­

“Hotel de Brabant.”

He heard a voice repeat, “Hotel de Brabant.”  He put out his head and saw a man writing something in a notebook with a pencil by the light of a street-lamp.

It was probably some police agent.

Without a passport, without letters, without papers, he was afraid of being arrested in the night, and he was longing for a good sleep.  A good bed to-night, he thought, and to-morrow the Deluge!  At the Hotel de Brabant he paid the coachman, but did not go into the hotel.  Moreover, he would have asked in vain for the Representatives Forel and Guilgot; both were there under false names.

He took to wandering about the streets.  It was eleven o’clock at night, and for a long time he had begun to feel utterly worn out.