t mug of coffee.
As he was eating a paper-boy came in and laid an _Echo_ on the table
at which he was sitting. He took it up mechanically, and ran his eye
carelessly over the columns. He was in no humour to be interested by
the tattle of an evening paper, but in a paragraph under the heading
of Foreign News a once familiar name caught his eye, and he read the
paragraph through. It ran as follows:--

RAILWAY OUTRAGE IN RUSSIA.

When the Berlin-Petersburg express stopped last night at Kovno,
the first stop after passing the Russian frontier, a shocking
discovery was made in the smoking compartment of the palace car
which has been on the train for the last few months. Colonel
Dornovitch, of the Imperial Police, who is understood to have
been on his return journey from a secret mission to Paris, was
found stabbed to the heart and quite dead. In the centre of the
forehead were two short straight cuts in the form of a *T*
reaching to the bone. Not long ago Colonel Dornovitch was
instrumental in unearthing a formidable Nihilist conspiracy, in
connection with which over fifty men and women of various social
ranks were exiled for life to Siberia. The whole affair is
wrapped in the deepest mystery, the only clue in the hands of the
police being the fact that the cross cut on the forehead of the
victim indicates that the crime is the work, not of the Nihilists
proper, but of that unknown and mysterious society usually
alluded to as the Terrorists, not one of whom has ever been seen
save in his crimes. How the assassin managed to enter and leave
the car unperceived while the train was going at full speed is an
apparently insoluble riddle. Saving the victim and the
attendants, the only passengers in the car who had not retired to
rest were another officer in the Russian service and Lord
Alanmere, who was travelling to St. Petersburg to resume, after
leave of absence, the duties of the Secretaryship to the British
Embassy, to which he was appointed some two years ago.

"Why, that must be the Lord Alanmere who was at Trinity in my time,
or rather Viscount Tremayne, as he was then," mused Arnold, as he
laid the paper down. "We were very good friends in those days. I
wonder if he'd know me now, and lend me a ten-pound note to get me
out of the infernal fix I'm in? I believe he would, for he was one of
the few really good-hearted