This morning Mirsky keeps the
actual stick, and Ritter comes to the office with the tube. He seizes the
first opportunity--probably when you were in this private room, and
Worsfold was talking to you from the corridor--to get at the tracings,
roll them up tightly, and put them in the tube, putting the tube back into
the umbrella-stand. At half-past twelve, or whenever it was, Mirsky turns
up for the first time with the actual stick and exchanges them, just as he
afterward did when he brought the drawings back."
"Yes, but Mirsky came half an hour after they were--Oh, yes, I see. What a
fool I was! I was forgetting. Of course, when I first missed the tracings,
they were in this walking-stick, safe enough, and I was tearing my hair
out within arm's reach of them!"
"Precisely. And Mirsky took them away before your very eyes. I expect
Ritter was in a rare funk when he found that the drawings were missed. He
calculated, no doubt, on your not wanting them for the hour or two they
would be out of the office."
"How lucky that it struck me to jot a pencil-note on one of them! I might
easily have made my note somewhere else, and then I should never have
known that they had been away.
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