"The side door." And the two men looked at each other with wide eyes full of knowledge.
As they ran to the foot of the broad staircase the tramp of scuffling feet, the roar of angry voices, came through the passages from the back of curtained doorways.

The servants' quarters seemed to be pandemonium.
The sounds approached.
"Half-way up!" said Paul, and they ran half-way up the broad staircase side by side.

There they stood and waited.
In a moment the baize doors were burst open, and a scuffling mass of men and women poured into the hall--a very sewer of humanity.
A yell of execration signalized their recognition of the prince.
"They are mad!" said Steinmetz, as the crowd surged forward toward the stairs with waving arms and the dull gleam of steel; with wild faces turned upward, wild mouths bellowing hatred and murder.
"It is a chance--it may stop them!" said Steinmetz.
His arm was outstretched steadily.

A loud report, a little puff of smoke shooting upward to the gilded ceiling, and for one brief moment the crowd stood still, watching one of their ringleaders, who was turning and twisting on his side half a dozen steps from the bottom.
The man writhed in silence with his hand to his breast, and the crowd stood aghast.

He held up his hand and gazed at it with a queer stupefaction.