Later, when the moon had set and only the faint starlight lay over the garden, the Ambassador still sat in his study, thoughtfully smoking a cigar. On the mantel, under a glass case, was a model of a battle-ship. Over it hung a traverse drawing of the Panama Canal cuttings, and maps and framed photographs looked from the walls between the dark-toned book-shelves. The floor was covered with a deep crimson rug of camel's-hair. The shaded reading-lamp on the desk threw a bright circle of light on an open volume of Treaties at his elbow. At length he rose, took up the lamp, and approached the mantel. He stood a moment looking thoughtfully at the model under its rounded glass. It was built to scale, and complete in every exterior detail, from the pennant at its head to the tiny black muzzles that peeped from its open casemates. Two years ago America had sent a fleet of such vessels to circumnavigate the globe. An European Squadron of even deadlier type would cast anchor the next morning in those waters. Yet now Bersonin's phrase rang insistently through his mind: "Mere silly shreds of steel!" It recurred like a refrain, mixing itself with the expert's curious words in the study, with that extraordinary incident of the piazza--which had bred a stealthy mistrust that would not down. With the lamp in his hand he opened the door into the hall and stood listening a moment. Save for the creaks and snappings that haunt frame structures in a land of rapid decay, the house was still. He entered the drawing-room, noiselessly undid the fastenings of a French window and stepped out on to the piazza. There he threw the lamplight about him, mentally reconstructing the scene of two hours before. Here he himself had stood, yonder Bersonin, and in the corner the dog--ten feet from the edge of the porch. It had vanished in the same instant that he had seen it leaping straight at the expert. What was it Bersonin had taken from his pocket? A weapon? And _where had the hound gone_? He stepped forward suddenly; the chair which had been thrown by the Japanese boy had been set upright, but beneath it, and on the piazza beyond, disposed in curious wreaths and whorls, like those made by steel filings above an electro-magnet, lay a thick sifting of what looked like reddish-yellow dust. He stooped and took up some in his fingers; it was dry and impalpable, of an extraordinary fineness. He stood looking at it a full minute, intent with some absorbed and disquieting communing. Then he shook his broad shoulders, as though dismissing an incredible idea, returned the lamp to the study and went slowly up the stair to his room.