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.