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.