ery long. The informer was amongst them, and Horne alone
could be let into the secret of my plan.

"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 t