Miss Cheyne of Essilmont, Volume 2 by James Grant

The morning was a clear, bright, sunny, and joyous one, the sun without cloud, the chimneys of Antwerp, as usual, without smoke, though the season was winter, and all its spires and countless crow-stepped gables were standing up clearly defined against a pure blue sky, when Bevil Goring, with high spirits, yet not without just emotions of great indignation, walked forth a free man from the place in which he had been detained, and, stepping into a voiture with his luggage, told the driver to take him to the Hôtel du Parc in the Place Verte, and kissed the ring of Alison which was on his finger again. He was free, and it had come about thus: --

The papers and manifestoes found among his property were of so serious and compromising a nature that he was on the point of being transmitted with them to Brussels, but he contrived to employ an _advokat_ (as an attorney or barrister is called there) in the Rue de l'Hôpital, who soon traced to the arrested Belgian workman those unlucky papers, and it chanced, oddly enough, that the mischievous Mr. Gaskins, having got a serious smash up in an accident on the railway to Waterloo, believing himself to be dying, made a full confession of the trick he had played to serve a lucrative master; and the Belgian authorities, duly aware at last of Goring's rank and position in society, confessed their haste and mistake, and, with a 'million pardons,' released him from an arrest that, after it had extended to some days, was nearly making him frantic, and he was welcomed and ushered to his former apartment at the hotel by the waiter Jacquot, though Maître Jean Picot, remembering his arrest, had some unpleasant doubts about receiving him.