tions of publicity was impossible. The delegates appealed to
their hosts of the British Foreign Office.

Unless the chiel amang them takin' notes was discovered and the leak
stopped, they declared the conference must end. Spurred on by
questions in Parliament, by appeals from the great banking world, by
criticisms not altogether unselfish from the other newspapers, the
Foreign Office surrounded St. James's Palace and the office of the
Times with an army of spies. Every secretary, stenographer, and
attendant at the conference was under surveillance, his past record
looked into, his present comings and goings noted. Even the
plenipotentiaries themselves were watched; and employees of the Times
were secretly urged to sell the government the man who was selling
secrets to them. But those who were willing to be "urged" did not know
the man; those who did know him refused to be bought.

By a process of elimination suspicion finally rested upon one Adolf
Hertz, a young Hungarian scholar who spoke and wrote all the mongrel
languages of the Balkans; who for years, as a copying clerk and
translator, had been employed by the Foreign Office, and who now by it
had been lent to the conference. For the reason that when he lived in
Budapest he was a correspondent of the Times, the police, in seeking
for the leak, centred their attention upon Hertz. But, though every
moment he was watched, and though Hertz knew he was watched, no present
link between him and the Times had been established--and this in spite
of the fact that the hours during which it was necessary to keep him
under closest observation were few. Those were the hours between the
closing of the conference, and midnight, when the provincial edition of
the Times went to press. For the remainder of the day, so far as the
police cared, Hertz could go to the devil! But for those hours, except
when on his return from the conference he locked himself in his
lodgings in Jermyn Street, detectives were always at his elbow.

It was supposed that it was during this brief period when he was locked
in his room that he wrote his report; but how, later, he conveyed it to
the Times no one could discover. In his rooms there was no telephone;
his doors and windows were openly watched; and after leaving his rooms
his movements were--as they always had been--methodical, following a
routine open to observation. His programme was invariably the same.
Each night at seven from his front