They were experts in evil, most of these men here. Their hands were
indelibly stained with some of the foulest crimes ever recorded in
history. But there was something ghoulish in this attempt to plunder
that awful thing lying there, helpless, in the water. There was also a
great relief to nerve-tension in shouting Horror and Anathema with self-
righteous indignation; and additional excitement in the suggested
"aristo in disguise."

Mole struggled vigorously. He was powerful and his fists were heavy. But
he was soon surrounded, held fast by both arms, whilst half a dozen
hands tore at his tattered clothes, searched him to his very skin, for
the booty which he was thought to have taken from the dead.

"Leave me alone, curse you!" he shouted, louder than his aggressors. "My
name is Paul Mole, I tell you. Ask the citizeness Evrard. I waited on
citizen Marat I prepared his bath. I was the only friend who did not
turn away from him in his sickness and his poverty. Leave me alone, I
say! Why," he added, with a hoarse laugh, "Jean Paul in his bath was as
naked as on the day he was born!"

"'Tis true," said one of those who had been most active in rummaging
through Mole's grimy rags. "There's nothing to be found on him."

But suspicion once aroused was not easily allayed. Mole's protestations
became more and more vigorous and emphatic. His papers were all in
order, he vowed. He had them on him: his own identity papers, clear for
anyone to see. Someone had dragged them out of his pocket; they were
dank and covered with splashes of mud--hardly legible. They were handed
over to a man who stood in the immediate circle of light projected by
the lamp. He seized them and examined them carefully. This man was short