ulous price
for the papers. They were brought to me by a lady wearing a thick
veil--a lady I had never seen before. I asked no questions, and paid her
the money. It subsequently transpired that the papers had been stolen,
as you perhaps know, from the house of Count Stepan Lanovitch--the house
to which you happen to be going--at Thors. Well, that is all ancient
history. It is to be supposed that the papers were stolen by Sydney
Bamborough, who brought them here--probably to this hotel, where his
wife was staying. He handed her the papers, and she conveyed them to me
in Paris. But before she reached Petersburg they would have been missed
by Stepan Lanovitch, who would naturally suspect the man who had been
staying in his house, Bamborough--a man with a doubtful reputation in
the diplomatic world, a professed doer of dirty jobs. Foreseeing this,
and knowing that the League was a big thing, with a few violent members
on its books, Sydney Bamborough did not attempt to leave Russia by the
western route. He probably decided to go through Nijni, down the Volga,
across the Caspian, and so on to Persia and India. You follow me?"

"Perfectly!" answered De Chauxville coldly.

"I have been here a week," went on the Russian spy, "making enquiries. I
have worked the whole affair out, link by link, till the evening when
the husband and wife parted. She went west with the papers. Where did he
go?"

De Chauxville picked up the cigarette, looked at it curiously, as at a
relic--the relic of the moment of strongest emotion through which he had
ever passed--and threw it into the ash-tray. He did not speak, and
after a moment Vassili went on, stating his case with lawyer-like
clearness.

"A body was found on the steppe," he said; "the body of a middle-aged
man dressed as a small commercial traveller would dress. He had a little
money in his pocket, but nothing to identify him. He was buried here in
Tver by the police, who received their information by an anonymous
post-card posted in Tver. The person who had found the body did not want
to be implicated in any enquiry. Now, who found the body? Who was the
dead man? Mrs. Sydney Bamborough has assumed that the dead man was her
husband; on the strength of that assumption she has become a princess. A
frail foundation upon which to build up her fortunes, eh?"

"How did she know that the body had been found?" asked De Chauxville,
perceiving the weak point in his companion's chain of argument.