vernment experts--by far
the most efficient and certain yet produced. It will travel at least four
hundred yards farther than any torpedo now made, with perfect accuracy of
aim (a very great desideratum, let me tell you), and will carry an
unprecedentedly heavy charge. There are other advantages--speed, simple
discharge, and so forth--that I needn't bother you about. The machine is
the result of many years of work and disappointment, and its design has
only been arrived at by a careful balancing of principles and means, which
are expressed on the only four existing sets of drawings. The whole thing,
I need hardly tell you, is a profound secret, and you may judge of my
present state of mind when I tell you that one set of drawings has been
stolen."

"From your house?"

"From my office, in Chancery Lane, this morning. The four sets of drawings
were distributed thus: Two were at the Admiralty Office, one being a
finished set on thick paper, and the other a set of tracings therefrom;
and the other two were at my own office, one being a penciled set,
uncolored--a sort of finished draft, you understand--and the other a set
of tracings similar to those at the Admiralty. It is this last set that
has gone. The two sets were kept together in one drawer in my room. Both
were there at ten this morning; of that I am sure, for I had to go to that
very drawer for something else when I first arrived. But at twelve the
tracings had vanished."

"You suspect somebody, probably?"

"I can not. It is a most extraordinary thing. Nobody has left the office
(except myself, and then only to come to you) since ten this morning, and
there has been no visitor. And yet the drawings are gone!"

"But have you searched the place?"

"Of course I have! It was twelve o'clock when I first discovered my loss,
and I have been turning the place upside down ever since--I and my
assistants. Every drawer has been emptied, every desk and table turned
over, the very carpet and linoleum have been taken up, but there is not a
sign of the drawings. My men even insisted on turning all their pockets
inside out, although I never for a moment suspected either of them, and it
would take a pretty big pocket to hold the drawings, doubled up as small
as they might be."

"You say your men--there are two, I understand--had neither left the
office?"

"Neither; and they are both staying in now. Worsfold suggested that it
would be more satisfactory if they did not leave