A policeman from Headquarters had joined Juve. The three men got into an empty second-class compartment.
In a voice quivering with shame, Vinson begged Juve not to allow anyone to enter. "I should be so ashamed," he muttered, with hanging head and hunched shoulders.
"We shall do our best to prevent it," Juve assured him. After an explanation with the station-master, the compartment was labelled "Reserved."
The train started. Vinson was wide awake now, and dejected to the last degree. After a hand-to-mouth existence, but still a free one, in England, he had allowed himself to be nabbed by the police, like the veriest simpleton! The papers would be full of it!
Vinson, who had been led into criminal ways by his love for a bad woman, troubled himself much less regarding the punishment to be meted out to him than about the dreadful distress his arrest would cause his mother. The old Alsatian mother, when she learned that her son was in prison charged with treason to France, would die of grief. Vinson wished with all his heart that he had stuck to his first decision—that he had killed himself rather than make confession to the journalist, Jérôme Fandor, who had wished to save him, and had helped him to escape, but who had really done him a bad service, since, deserter as he was, he had been caught like the most vulgar of criminals!
The train stopped at a station.
"I am dying of thirst," mumbled Vinson.
Juve sent his second in command for a bottle of water from the refreshment buffet.
Vinson thanked Juve with a grateful nod.
Refreshed, Vinson pulled his wits together.