“I will not enter into the detail of my preparations.  It was not very easy to arrange, but it was done very well, with a really convincing effect.  The sham police invaded the restaurant, whose shutters were immediately put up.  The surprise was perfect.  Most of the Hermione Street party were found in the second cellar, enlarging the hole communicating with the vaults of the great public building.  At the first alarm, several comrades bolted through impulsively into the aforesaid vault, where, of course, had this been a genuine raid, they would have been hopelessly trapped.  We did not bother about them for the moment.  They were harmless enough.  The top floor caused considerable anxiety to Horne and myself.  There, surrounded by tins of Stone’s Dried Soup, a comrade, nick-named the Professor (he was an ex-science student) was engaged in perfecting some new detonators.  He was an abstracted, self-confident, sallow little man, armed with large round spectacles, and we were afraid that under a mistaken impression he would blow himself up and wreck the house about our ears.  I rushed upstairs and found him already at the door, on the alert, listening, as he said, to ‘suspicious noises down below.’  Before I had quite finished explaining to him what was going on he shrugged his shoulders disdainfully and turned away to his balances and test-tubes.  His was the true spirit of an extreme revolutionist.  Explosives were his faith, his hope, his weapon, and his shield.  He perished a couple of years afterwards in a secret laboratory through the premature explosion of one of his improved detonators.

“Hurrying down again, I found an impressive scene in the gloom of the big cellar.  The man who personated the inspector (he was no stranger to the part) was speaking harshly, and giving bogus orders to his bogus subordinates for the removal of his prisoners.  Evidently nothing enlightening had happened so far.  Horne, saturnine and swarthy, waited with folded arms, and his patient, moody expectation had an air of stoicism well in keeping with the situation.  I detected in the shadows one of the Hermione Street group surreptitiously chewing up and swallowing a small piece of paper.  Some compromising scrap, I suppose; perhaps just a note of a few names and addresses.  He was a true and faithful ‘companion.’  But the fund of secret malice which lurks at the bottom of our sympathies caused me to feel amused at that perfectly uncalled-for performance.

“In every other respect the risky experiment, the theatrical coup, if you like to call it so, seemed to have failed.  The deception could not be kept up much longer; the explanation would bring about a very embarrassing and even grave situation.  The man who had eaten the paper would be furious.  The fellows who had bolted away would be angry, too.

“To add to my vexation, the door communicating with the other cellar, where the printing-presses were, flew open, and our young lady revolutionist appeared, a black silhouette in a close-fitting dress and a large hat, with the blaze of gas flaring in there at her back.  Over her shoulder I perceived the arched eyebrows and the red necktie of her brother.