eat national indignation,
had arrived, and the press had made him acquainted with all the
circumstances connected therewith. As why not, when the whole country
was up in arms over it and every newspaper in the land headlined it
in double caps and poured forth the story in full detail?

It had its genesis in something which had happened at Gosport in the
preceding week, and happened in this startling manner:

In the waterway between Barrow Island and the extreme end of the
Royal Clarence Victualling Yard there had been found floating the
body of a man of about five-and-thirty years of age, fully and
fashionably clothed and having all those outward signs which betoken
a person of some standing.

It was evident at once that death must have been the result of
accident, and that the victim had been unable to swim, for the hands
were encased in kid gloves, the coat was tightly buttoned, and a
pair of field-glasses in a leather case still hung from the long
shoulder-strap which supported the weight of them. The victim's
inability to swim was established by the fact that he had made
no effort to rid himself of these hampering conditions, and was
clinging tightly to a foot-long bit of driftwood, which he must
have clutched at as it floated by.

It was surmised, therefore, that the man must have fallen into the
water in the dark--either from the foreshore or from some vessel
or small boat in which he was journeying at the time--and had been
carried away by the swift current and drowned without being missed,
the condition of the body clearly establishing the fact that it had
been in the water for something more than a fortnight when found.
Later it was identified by one of the deck hands of the pleasure
steamer which cruises round the Isle of Wight daily as being that
of a man he had seen aboard that vessel on one of its night trips to
Alum Bay between two and three weeks previously; and still later it
was discovered that a boatman in that locality had been hired to take
a gentleman from the Needles to a yacht "lying out to sea" that
selfsame night, and that the gentleman in question never turned up.

What followed gave these two circumstances an appalling significance.
For when the body was carried to the mortuary, and its clothing
searched for possible clues to identification, there was found upon
it a sealed packet addressed simply "A. Steinmueller, Koenigstrasse
8," and inside that packet there were two unmounted photogr