The Adventure of the Second Stain

The Adventure of The Second Stain is a Sherlock Holmes story written by Sir Conan Doyle, best known for his novel The Hound of the Baskervilles. It is one of 13 stories in the cycle collected as The Return of Sherlock Holmes. Doyle ranked "The Adventure of the Second Stain" eighth in a list of his twelve favorite Sherlock Holmes short stories.

Lord Bellinger, the Prime Minister, and Trelawney Hope, the Secretary for European Affairs, come to Sherlock Holmes about the matter of a document stolen from Hope's dispatch box, which he kept at home in Whitehall Terrace when not at work. If divulged, this document could bring about very dire consequences for all of Europe, even war. They are loath to tell Holmes at first the exact nature of the document's contents, but eventually they feel that they must tell him that it was a rather injudicious letter from a foreign potentate. It disappeared from the dispatch box one evening when Hope was out for four hours. No-one in the house knew about the document, not even the Secretary's wife, with whom he will not discuss his work. None of the servants could have guessed what was in the box.