at
the knoll, and were thus able to assure him with sufficient
truthfulness that they could not tell him where the princess was. The
bursts of suspicion therefore were brief.

But there was one man in England in whom suspicion had not died down.
Suspicion is, indeed, hardly the word for the feeling of Sir Maurice
Falconer in the matter. When he first read in his _Morning Post_ of
the disappearance of the Princess Elizabeth of Cassel-Nassau from
Muttle Deeping Grange he said confidently to himself: "The Twins
again!" and to that conviction his mind clung.

It was greatly strengthened by a study of the reproduction of the
Socialist manifesto on the front page of an enterprising halfpenny
paper. He told himself that Socialists are an educated, even
over-educated folk, and if one of them did set himself to draw a skull
and cross-bones, the drawing would be, if not exquisite, at any rate
accurate and unsmudged; that it was highly improbable that a Socialist
would spell desperate with two "a's" in an important document without
being corrected by a confederate. On the other hand the drawing of the
skull and cross-bones seemed to him to display a skill to which the
immature genius of the Terror might easily have attained, while he
could readily conceive that he would spell desperate with two "a's" in
any document.

But Sir Maurice was not a man to interfere lightly in the pleasures of
his relations; and he would not have interfered at all had it not been
for the international situation produced by the disappearance of the
princess. As it was he was so busy with lunches, race meetings,
dinners, theater parties, dances and suppers that he was compelled to
postpone intervention till the sixth day, when every Socialist organ
and organization from San Francisco eastward to Japan was loudly
disavowing any connection with the crime, the newspapers of England and
Germany were snarling and howling and roaring and bellowing at one
another, and the Foreign Office and the German Chancellery were wiring
frequent, carefully coded appeals to each other to invent some
plausible excuse for not mobilizing their armies and fleets. Even then
Sir Maurice, who knew too well the value of German press opinion, would
not have interfered, had not the extremely active wife of a cabinet
minister consulted him about the easiest way for her to sell twenty
thousand pounds' worth of consols. He disliked the lady so strongly
that after telling her