The Count rushed into the guard-room, hurriedly explained his errand to the superintendent, and came out, but a moment later, with three men.

“We must make room for these good fellows somehow,” he said briefly, and room was made.  Chester noticed with surprise that each man was armed, not only with a stave, but with a revolver.  The French police do not stand on ceremony even with potential criminals.

“And now,” said the Count to the coachman, “five louis, my friend, if you can get us to the Chalet des Muguets in seven minutes—­”

They began driving at a breakneck pace, the driver whipping up his horse, lashing it in a way that horrified Chester.  The light little carriage rocked from side to side.

“If the man doesn’t drive more carefully,” cried out the Englishman, “we shall be spilt—­and that won’t do us any good, will it?”

The Count called out, “If there’s an accident you get nothing, my friend!  Drive as quickly as you like, but drive carefully.”

They swept on through the town, and so along the dimly-lighted shady avenues with which even Chester had become so familiar during the last few days.

Paul de Virieu sat with clenched hands, staring in front of him.  Remorse filled his soul—­remorse and anguish.  If Sylvia had been done to death, as he now had very little doubt Anna Wolsky had been done to death, then he would die too.  What was the vice which had meant all to him for so many years compared to his love for Sylvia?

The gendarmes murmured together in quick, excited tones.  They scented that something really exciting, something that would perhaps lead to promotion, was going to happen.

At last, as the carriage turned into a dark road, Count Paul suddenly began to talk, at the very top of his voice.

“Speak, Mr. Chester, speak as loud as you can!  Shout!  Say anything that you like!  They may as well hear that we are coming—­”

But Chester could not do what the other man so urgently asked him to do.  Not to save his life could he have opened his mouth and shouted as the other was now doing.

“We are going to pay an evening call—­what you in England call an evening call!  We are going to fetch our friend—­our friend, Mrs. Bailey; she is so charming, so delightful!  We are going to fetch her because she has been spending the evening with her friends, the Wachners.  That old she-devil—­you remember her, surely?  The woman who asked you concerning your plans?  It is she I fear—­”

“Je crois que c’est ici, Monsieur?” the man turned round on his seat.  “I have done it in six minutes!”

The horse was suddenly brought up short opposite the white gate.  Was this where the Wachners lived?  Chester stooped down.  The place looked very different now from what it had looked in the daylight.

The windows of the small, low house were closely shuttered, but where the shutters met in one of the rooms glinted a straight line of light.