Nikola, angry and perplexed, at length decided to come to me in Cairo and to confess the truth; and he arrived, a very tragic figure, with tears pouring from his eyes. “I listened to that wicked clerk,” he said, “who told me that Lord Kitchener’s Secretary would certainly seize the one good bronze for England, or you would seize it for Cairo; and now my deceit has turned upon myself.” He paced about the room, wringing his hands, as he spoke; and I could but forgive him his deception, which had been due to a very natural fear, and promise to do my best to recover the bronze for him, since he had lost it while it had been at the office of my Department. As a result of the steps which I took, the clerk was arrested, but denied all knowledge of the stolen antiquity; Nikola, meanwhile, more or less burgled the house of the clerk, and was chased out by the inmates at the point of a revolver; and at length, after strange adventures in the native underworld, we traced the bronze to a well-known Arab dealer, who, of course, declared that he knew nothing of the matter. I then invited the above-mentioned Diplomatic Secretary, and a well-known colleague of his at the British Agency to help me, my idea being that the fear of the redoubtable Lord Kitchener, which had been the cause of the trouble, might now be employed to some purpose; and these two good friends readily joined in the hunt. Space will not allow me to describe the exciting events which followed, and which might have formed the plot of a Sherlock Holmes adventure--our trapping the Arab dealer and holding him prisoner while a certain hiding-place of his was searched; the false scents which he caused us to follow up; our final exasperation with him, and the giving of a time-limit in which he was to confess if he wished to save himself from the deepest and darkest dungeon in Cairo. Suffice it to say that, one minute before the time-limit expired, the man confessed that he had bought the missing bronze from the Zagazig clerk, and had sold it to a well-known Italian dealer. We then approached this latter dealer, telling him that the object which he had bought had been stolen from Nikola, and must be returned; and, after further adventures, the bronze was at last handed back to its owner, who came to me and, with tears of gratitude, blessed me and my posterity unto the end of the world.