. His hand, all muddy and bloodstained,
still held a revolver.

The other hand was stretched out toward Etta, who lay across his feet,
crouching against the wall. Death had found and left her in an attitude
of fear, shielding her bowed head from a blow with her upraised hands.
Her loosened hair fell in a long wave of gold down to the bloodstained
hand outstretched toward her. She was kneeling in De Chauxville's blood,
which stained the stone floor of the passage.

Paul leaned forward and laid his fingers on the bare arm, just below a
bracelet which gleamed in the lamplight. She was quite dead. He held a
lamp close to her. There was no mark or scratch upon her arm or
shoulder. The blow which had torn her hair down had killed her without
any disfigurement. The silken skirt of her dress, which lay across the
passage, was trampled and stained by the tread of a hundred feet.

Then Paul went to Claude de Chauxville. He stooped down and slipped his
skilled fingers inside the torn and mud-stained clothing. Here also was
death.

Paul stood upright and looked at them as they lay, silent, motionless,
with their tale untold. Maggie and Steinmetz stood watching him. He went
to the door, which was of solid oak four inches thick, and examined the
fastenings. There had been no damage done to bolt, or lock, or hinge.
The door had been opened from the inside. He looked slowly round,
measuring the distances.

"What is the meaning of it?" he said at length to Steinmetz, in a dull
voice. Maggie winced at the sound of it.

Steinmetz did not answer at once, but hesitated--after the manner of a
man weighing words which will never be forgotten by their hearers.

"It seems to me," he said, with a slow, wise charity, the best of its
kind, "quite clear that De Chauxville died in trying to save her--the
rest must be only guesswork."

Maggie had come forward and was standing beside him.

"And in guessing let us be charitable--is it not so?" he said, turning
to her, with a twist of his humorous lips.

"I suppose," he went on, after a little pause, "that Claude de
Chauxville has been at the bottom of all our trouble. All his life he
has been one of the stormy petrels of diplomacy. Wherever he has gone
trouble has followed later. By some means he obtained sufficient mastery
over the princess to compel her to obey his orders. The means he
employed were threats. He had it in his power to make mischief, and in
such affairs a woman is so helple