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.