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. Steinmüller, Königstrasse 8," and inside that packet there were two unmounted photographs of the exterior of Blockhouse Fort and the Southsea Fort, a more or less accurate ground-plan drawing of the interior of the Portsmouth Dockyard, together with certain secret information relative to supplies and to the proposed armament of cruisers now undergoing alteration and reëquipment. The wrath and amazement engendered by that discovery, however, were as nothing compared with the one which so swiftly followed. Brought up before the Admiral Superintendent and the Board, John Beachman, the dock master--who alone knew these things outside of the Admiralty--was obliged to admit that one person, and one only--his eldest son--was in a position to obtain admission to the safe in which he kept his private papers, and that son was engaged to a young lady whom he had met during a holiday tour on the Continent.