CHAPTER VIII: The Invitation.
It was in truth a strange situation, this chance meeting between Percy Blakeney and ex-Ambassador Chauvelin.
Marguerite looked up at her husband.

She saw him shrug his broad shoulders as he first caught sight of Chauvelin, and glance down in his usual lazy, good-humoured manner at the shrunken figure of the silent Frenchman.

The words she meant to say never crossed her lips; she was waiting to hear what the two men would say to one another.
The instinct of the grande dame in her, the fashionable lady accustomed to the exigencies of society, just gave her sufficient presence of mind to make the requisite low curtsey before His Royal Highness.

But the Prince, forgetting his accustomed gallantry, was also absorbed in the little scene before him.

He, too, was looking from the sable-clad figure of Chauvelin to that of gorgeously arrayed Sir Percy.