He had given a handsome present to the inspector when he came into his kingdom--how long ago it seemed!--and he had seen him several times since on public occasions,--at the Opera, at Chiswick Flower-shows, at the Derby, and similar popular resorts. He had the inspector's address somewhere,--at some police-station down in the City; and he went to his desk, and turned over a heterogeneous collection of papers, and found it. Then he sent Banks down to the station-house; and that evening Inspector Stellfox was shown into Sir Charles's study, and placed by him in possession of the facts. The inspector went to work in his own special way. It was a peculiar job, he said, and not too easy to work out; but he had hopes. He went back to the station-house, and communicated as much as he chose to tell to two of his best men. Then all three went to work. They found out the cabman who had taken Mrs. Hammond to the South-Eastern Railway; they found the porter who had taken the boxes off the cab, and the luggage-labeller who had marked them; they found the tick-clerk who had registered them "in transit," and whose book showed not merely the number of pounds' weight, but the name in which they were entered. They were booked for Cologne,--one could not in those days register any farther,--and for Cologne Sir Charles started immediately. There he picked up the trace. Two French ladies had arrived by the Ostend train, and gone--not to any of the grand hotels bordering the Rhine, but to a second-rate house, yet quiet and thoroughly respectable for all that--the Brüsseler Hof, kept for the last thirty years by Anton Schumacher. Were they recollected there? Of course they were. Anton Schumacher's eldest son Franz had been rather fetched by the trim appearance of the younger lady, and had gone down with them to the boat, and seen them on board the Königin Victoria, and recommended them specially to the care of the _conducteur_, who was a great friend of his. Where did they take tickets for? Why, at his advice, they took them for Cassel, on the left bank of the river. They were going, as he understood, to Baden-Baden, and he had advised them to sleep at Barth's--a right clean comfortable hotel in Cassel--and then post on to Frankfurt, where they could spend the afternoon and the night, and so get on right pleasantly to Baden the next day. To Baden! Sir Charles Mitford's heart sunk within him as he heard the words. Baden! That was where Laura had been so talked about for her desperate carrying on with Tchernigow nearly three years ago. And she was gone there now, and Tchernigow had disappeared from London!