With a passport in perfect order, vised for here and there and everywhere, with good clothes, good luggage, and nothing contraband in baggage or demeanor, Alexandrowo is easy enough.  Obedience and patience will see the traveller through.  There is no fear of his being left in the huge station, or of his going anywhere but to his avowed and rightful destination.  But with a passport that is old or torn, with a visa which bears any but a recent date, with a restless eye or a hunted look, the voyager had better take his chance of dropping from the footboard at speed, especially if it be a misty night.

Like sheep, the passengers are driven from the train in which not so much as a newspaper is left.  Only the sleeping-car is allowed to go through, but it is emptied and searched.  The travellers are penned within a large room where the luggage is inspected, and they are deprived of their passports.  When the customs formalities are over they are allowed to find the refreshment-room, and there console themselves with weak tea in tumblers until such time as they are released.

The train on this occasion was a full one, and the great inspection-room, with its bare walls and glaring lights, crammed to overflowing.  The majority of the travellers seemed, as usual, to be Germans.  There were a few ladies.  And two men, better dressed than the others, had the appearance of Englishmen.  They drifted together—­just as the women drifted together and the little knot of shady characters who hoped against hope that their passports were in order.  For the most part, no one spoke, though one German commercial traveller protested with so much warmth that an examination of his trunks was nothing but an intrusion on the officer’s valuable time that a few essayed to laugh and feel at their ease.

Reginald Cartoner, who had been among the first to quit Lady Orlay’s, was an easy first across the frontier.  He had twelve hours’ start of anybody, and was twenty-four hours ahead of all except Paul Deulin, whose train had steamed into Berlin Station as the Warsaw Express left it.  He seemed to know the ways of Alexandrowo, and the formalities to be observed at the frontier, but he was not eager to betray his knowledge.  He obeyed with a silent patience the instructions of the white-aproned, black-capped porter who had a semi-official charge of him.  He made no attempt to escape an examination of his luggage, and he avoided the refreshment-room tea.

Cartoner glanced at the man, whose appearance would seem to indicate that he was a fellow-countryman, and made sure that he did not know him.  Then he looked at him again, and the other happened to turn his profile.  Cartoner recognized the profile, and drew away to the far corner of the examination-room.  But they drifted together again—­or, perhaps, the younger man made a point of approaching.  It was, at all events, he who, when all had been marshalled into the refreshment-room, drew forward a chair and sat down at the table where Cartoner had placed himself.