“Captain Markham had given a description of ‘the old friend he had met years ago abroad.’ This description vaguely coincided with that given by Mrs. Bowden of the mysterious foreigner. But the Captain’s replies to the cross-questionings of the detectives in charge of the case were always singularly reticent and lame. ‘I had lost sight of him for nearly twenty years,’ he explained, ‘and do not know what his present abode and occupation might be. When I knew him years ago, he was a man of independent means, without a fixed abode, and a great traveller. I believe that he is a German by nationality, but I don’t think that I ever knew this as a fact. His name was Johann Schmidt.’ “I may as well tell you here, at once, that the mysterious foreigner managed to make good his escape. He was traced as far as the South Western Railway Station, where he was seen to rush through the barrier, just in time to catch the express up to town. At Waterloo he was lost sight of in the crowd. “The police were keenly on the alert; no trace of the missing jewels had as yet been found. Then it was that, gradually, the story of the secret plan of Port Arthur reached the ears of the general public. Who first told it, and to whom, it is difficult to conjecture, but you know what a way things of that sort have of leaking out. “The secret of Captain Markham’s mission had of necessity been known to several people, and a secret shared by many soon ceases to be one at all; anyway, within a week of the so-called ‘Portsmouth outrage,’ it began to be loudly whispered that the robbery of Mrs. Markham’s jewels was only a mask that covered the deliberate theft of the plans of Port Arthur. “And then the inevitable happened. Already Captain Markham’s strange attitude had been severely commented upon, and now the public, backed by the crowd of amateur detectives who read penny novelettes and form conclusions of their own, had made up its mind that Captain Markham was a party to the theft—that he was either the tool or the accomplice of the mysterious foreigner and that, in fact, he had been either bribed or terrorised into giving up the plan of Port Arthur to an enemy of the Russian government. The crime was all the more heinous as by this act of treachery a British ship, manned by a British crew, had been sent to certain destruction. “What rendered the whole case doubly mysterious was that Messrs. Mills and Co. seemed to take the matter with complete indifference. They refused to be interviewed, or to give any information about the _Artemis_ at all, and seemed callously willing to await events. “The public was furious; the newspapers stormed; every one felt that the _Artemis_ should be stopped at any cost at her next port of call, and not allowed to continue her perilous journey.