Steinmetz stood on the platform and watched the train pass slowly away into the night.  Then he went toward a lamp, and taking a pocket-handkerchief from his pocket, examined each corner of it in succession.  It was a small pocket-handkerchief of fine cambric.  In one corner were the initials S.S.B., worked neatly in white—­such embroidery as is done in St. Petersburg.

“Ach!” exclaimed Steinmetz shortly; “something told me that that was he.”

He turned the little piece of cambric over and over, examining it slowly, with a heavy Germanic cunning.  He had taken this handkerchief from the body of the nameless rider who was now lying alone on the steppe twelve miles away.

Steinmetz returned to the large refreshment room, and ordered the waiter to bring him a glass of Benedictine, which he drank slowly and thoughtfully.

Then he went toward the large black stove which stands in the railway restaurant at Tver.  He opened the door with the point of his boot.  The wood was roaring and crackling within.  He threw the handkerchief in and closed the door.

“It is as well, mon prince,” he muttered, “that I found this, and not you.”

CHAPTER III

DIPLOMATIC

“All that there is of the most brilliant and least truthful in Europe,” M. Claude de Chauxville had said to a lady earlier in the evening, apropos of the great gathering at the French Embassy, and the mot had gone the round of the room.

In society a little mot will go a long way.  M. le Baron de Chauxville was, moreover, a manufacturer of mots.  By calling he was attache to the French Embassy in London; by profession he was an epigrammatist.  That is to say, he was a sort of social revolver.  He went off if one touched him conversationally, and like others among us, he frequently missed fire.

Of course, he had but little real respect for the truth.  If one wishes to be epigrammatic, one must relinquish the hope of being either agreeable or veracious.  M. de Chauxville did not really intend to convey the idea that any of the persons assembled in the great guest chambers of the French Embassy that evening were anything but what they seemed.

He could not surely imagine that Lady Mealhead—­the beautiful spouse of the seventh Earl Mealhead—­was anything but what she seemed:  namely, a great lady.  Of course, M. de Chauxville knew that Lady Mealhead had once been the darling of the music-halls, and that a thousand hearts had vociferously gone out to her from sixpenny and even threepenny galleries when she answered to the name of Tiny Smalltoes.  But then M. de Chauxville knew as well as you and I—­Lady Mealhead no doubt had told him—­that she was the daughter of a clergyman, and had chosen the stage in preference to the school-room as a means of supporting her aged mother.  Whether M. de Chauxville believed this or not, it is not for us to enquire.  He certainly looked as if he believed it when Lady Mealhead told him—­and his expressive Gallic eyes waxed tender at the mention of her mother, the relict of the late clergyman, whose name had somehow been overlooked by Crockford.  A Frenchman loves his mother—­in the abstract.