As it was to be expected that several letters from Paris would arrive at the hotel, addressed to M. Pascal, I arranged to call or send for them.  The same course was adopted with regard to a few articles which M. Zola had given to be washed and which had not yet been returned to him.  Some of these things were significantly marked with the letter ‘Z,’ and for this reason it was desirable that they should be recovered.  Here I may mention that during the next few days my wife repeatedly called at the Grosvenor for M. Zola’s correspondence, a circumstance which doubtless gave rise to the rumour that Mme. Zola had joined her husband in London.

The exodus from the hotel was not particularly imposing.  M. Desmoulin had originally intended to stay but one day in London, and thus merely had a dressing-case with him.  As for M. Zola, his few belongings (inclusive of a small bottle of ink, which he would not part with) were stuffed into his pockets, or went towards the making of a peculiarly shaped newspaper parcel, tied round with odd bits of string.  Dressing-case and parcel were duly brought down into the grand vestibule, where the hotel servants smiled on them benignly.  There was, indeed, some little humour in the situation.

The novelist, with his gold pince-nez and gold watch-chair, his red rosette, and a large and remarkably fine diamond sparking on one of his little fingers, looked so eminently respectable that it was difficult to associate him with the wretched misshapen newspaper parcel—­his only luggage!—­which he eyed so jealously.  However, as the attendants were all liberally fee’d, they remained strictly polite even if they felt amused.  I ordered a hansom to be called, and we just contrived to squeeze ourselves and the precious newspaper parcel inside it.  The dressing-case was hoisted aloft.  Then the hotel porter asked me, ‘Where to, sir?’

‘Charing Cross Station,’ I replied, and the next moment we were bowling along Buckingham Palace Road.

Perhaps a minute elapsed before I tapped the cab-roof with my walking stick.  On cabby looking down at me, I said, ’Did I tell you Charing Cross just now, driver?  Ah! well, I made a mistake.  I meant Waterloo.’

‘Right, sir,’ rejoined cabby; and on we went.

It was a paltry device, perhaps, this trick of giving one direction in the hearing of the hotel servants, and then another when the hotel was out of sight.  But, as the reader must know, this kind of thing is always done in novels—­particularly in detective stories.

And recollections had come to me of some of Gaboriau’s tales which long ago I had helped to place before the English public.  It might be that the renowned Monsieur Lecoq or his successor, or perchance some English confrere like Mr. Sherlock Holmes, would presently be after us, and so it was just as well to play the game according to the orthodox rules of romance.  After all, was it not in something akin to a romance that I was living?