"What is it?" asked Jean Jacques, seeing Stolphe in the hands of two
men, and hearing the snap of steel. "Wanted for firing a house for
insurance--wanted for falsifying the accounts of a Land Company--wanted
for his own good, Mr. Hugo Stolphe, C.O.D.--collect on delivery!" said
the officer of the law. "And collected just in time!"

"We didn't mean to take him till to-morrow," the officer added, "but out
on the river one of us saw this gladiator business here in the red-light
zone, and there wasn't any time to lose. . . . I don't know what your
business with him was," the long-moustached detective said to Jean
Jacques, "but whatever the grudge is, if you don't want to appear in
court in the morning, the walking's good out of town night or day--so
long!"

He hustled his prisoner out.

Jean Jacques did not want to appear in court, and as the walking was
officially good at dawn, he said good-bye to Virginie Poucette's sister
through the crack of a door, and was gone before she could restrain him.

"Well, things happen that way," he said, as he turned back to look at
Shilah before it disappeared from view.

"Ah, the poor, handsome vaurien!" the woman at the tavern kept saying to
her husband all that day; and she could not rest till she had written to
Virginie how Jean Jacques came to Shilah in the evening, and went with
the dawn.