Still, I doubt
if even that knowledge would have helped her if she had not also
known something which I supposed no one else in the world knew but
myself and one other man. And, curiously enough, the other man was a
Queen's Messenger, too, and a friend of mine. You must know that up
to the time of this robbery I had always concealed my despatches in a
manner peculiarly my own. I got the idea from that play called 'A
Scrap of Paper.' In it a man wants to hide a certain compromising
document. He knows that all his rooms will be secretly searched for
it, so he puts it in a torn envelope and sticks it up where anyone
can see it on his mantle-shelf. The result is that the woman who is
ransacking the house to find it looks in all the unlikely places, but
passes over the scrap of paper that is just under her nose. Sometimes
the papers and packages they give us to carry about Europe are of
very great value, and sometimes they are special makes of cigarettes,
and orders to court-dressmakers. Sometimes we know what we are
carrying and sometimes we do not. If it is a large sum of money or a
treaty, they generally tell us. But, as a rule, we have no knowledge
of what the package contains; so to be on the safe side, we naturally
take just as great care of it as though we knew it held the terms of
an ultimatum or the crown-jewels.
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