dham. "Do you mean to say you thought I
had?"

"Of course I did! who else?" said Rendel.

"Who else?" Stamfordham repeated. "I have come here to ask you that."

"To ask _me_?" said Rendel, bewildered. "How should I know? I have not
seen those papers since I gave the packet sealed to Thacker to take it
to you."

"And I received it," said Stamfordham, "sealed and untampered with, and
opened it myself, and it has not been out of my keeping since."

"But at the German Embassy," said Rendel, "since it was telegraphed...?"

"The substance of the interview was telegraphed," said Stamfordham, "but
not the map--_not the map_," he said emphatically. "That map no one has
seen besides Bergowitz, you, and myself. Bergowitz it would be quite
absurd to suspect, he is as genuinely taken back as I am--I know that it
didn't get out through me, and therefore----" he paused and looked
Rendel in the face.

"What!" said Rendel, with a sort of cry. A horrible light, an incredible
interpretation was beginning to dawn upon him. "You can't think it was
through _me_?"

"What else can I think?" said Stamfordham--Rendel still looked at him
aghast--"since the papers after I gave them into your keeping were
apparently not out of it until they passed into mine again? I brought
them to you here myself. Of course I see now I ought not to have done
so, but how could I have imagined----"

Rendel hurriedly interrupted him.

"Lord Stamfordham, not a soul but myself can have had access to those
papers. I went out of the room, it is true," and he went rapidly over in
his mind the sequence of events the day before, "for a short half-hour
perhaps, when you came back here and I went out with you, but before
leaving the room I remember distinctly that I shut the cover of my
writing-table down with the spring, and tried it to see that it was
shut, and then unlocked it myself when I came back."

"Was any one else in the room?" said Stamfordham.

"Yes," said Rendel, and a sudden idea occurred to him, to be dismissed
as soon as entertained, "Sir William Gore."

"Gore?" said Stamfordham, looking at Rendel, but forbearing any comment
on his father-in-law.

"It was quite impossible," Rendel said decidedly, answering
Stamfordham's unspoken words, "that he could have got at the papers;
for, as I told you, when I came back again they were exactly where I had
left them, and the thing locked with this very complicated key, and he
showed it hanging on his ch