"Who else?" Stamfordham repeated. "I have come here to ask you that."
"To ask me?" said Rendel, bewildered. "How should I know? I have not seen those papers since I gave the packet sealed to Thacker to take it to you."
"And I received it," said Stamfordham, "sealed and untampered with, and opened it myself, and it has not been out of my keeping since."
"But at the German Embassy," said Rendel, "since it was telegraphed...?"
"The substance of the interview was telegraphed," said Stamfordham, "but not the map—not the map," he said emphatically. "That map no one has seen besides Bergowitz, you, and myself. Bergowitz it would be quite absurd to suspect, he is as genuinely taken back as I am—I know that it didn't get out through me, and therefore——" he paused and looked Rendel in the face.
"What!" said Rendel, with a sort of cry. A horrible light, an incredible interpretation was beginning to dawn upon him. "You can't think it was through me?"
"What else can I think?" said Stamfordham—Rendel still looked at him aghast—"since the papers after I gave them into your keeping were apparently not out of it until they passed into mine again? I brought them to you here myself. Of course I see now I ought not to have done so, but how could I have imagined——"
Rendel hurriedly interrupted him.
"Lord Stamfordham, not a soul but myself can have had access to those papers. I went out of the room, it is true," and he went rapidly over in his mind the sequence of events the day before, "for a short half-hour perhaps, when you came back here and I went out with you, but before leaving the room I remember distinctly that I shut the cover of my writing-table down with the spring, and tried it to see that it was shut, and then unlocked it myself when I came back."
"Was any one else in the room?" said Stamfordham.