Let me see, how many does that make—I mean when, half an hour later, I had given him as much as I then knew of the outline of this story? How many people were parties in greater or less degree to the highly important public matter that we were struggling to keep from the light of day?

There were the five men at our breakfast-party: Esdaile, Rooke, Mackwith, Hubbard and myself. And the three women: Mrs. Esdaile, Mrs. Cunningham and Joan. Westbury, and an unknown number of his associates; and Inspector Webster, also an unknown quantity. And of course there was Charles Valentine Smith himself. I am not including Hanson and old William Dadley the picture-frame maker. Call it certainly eleven. Lord Glenfield made the twelfth. We were getting on.

He took my narrative quite lightly. Indeed, parts of it seemed almost to amuse him. He asked if he might have a second liqueur, and then sat back in the padded alcove smiling at his glass.

"Well," he said at last, "it would make quite a neat prize competition, wouldn't it?" Tremendous force as he is, he can never quite shake off his interest in prize competitions.

I asked him in what way.

"I mean the position of your painter-friend. As you've told the story it strikes me that he's the key of the whole situation. And I should say that he intended to remain so."

"What makes you say that?"

"Well, you say he has his talkee-talkee with the flying-fellow, doesn't give you a single word of explanation, but simply carries him off into the country. It looks as if he thought he'd already told you too much and was pulling out again. I don't think he intends to say anything more. You take a short holiday, go down there, and see if I'm right."

(How far he was right you already know. As I have told you in anticipation, I did go down, waited for a couple of days, then tackled Esdaile about it, and found he had taken the very line Glenfield indicated.)

"So it's really publicity you're all scared of?" he continued presently. "Well, I told you I had a bit of a pull here and there. Publicity's rather my line of country, you know."

"Yes, but hardly against the law of the land," I objected. "You can't go about suborning judges and telling the police their business—even you."

"Good gracious, man!" he cried energetically, staring incredulously at me. "Don't tell me I've been employing an editor who doesn't know any more than that!"

"Than what?"

"Than clumsy work of that sort! Suborn judges! Meddle with the police! I've been entrusting the Circus to a man who talks like that!... Hurry up that waiter!"

"But isn't that what it comes to?"

"You haven't got to let it come to that—not within a hundred miles of it! You shock me! Tell me now what you do when you find yourself all balled up and unable to meet a Case?"

"That's precisely what I want to know."

"Then I'll tell you. You attack. You manufacture a totally different Case and then proceed to demolish it. First of all you make hay of charges that were never made, and then you carry the fight over to the other fellow. If somebody says this flying-fellow's been getting gun-work in, you simply sidestep, come back, and want to know what's wrong that he hasn't been recommended for a K.B.E. Never defend, my boy. Always go for your man. What is it that Boche philosopher wrote? 'Every attack is a victory.' You've got a beauty of an opening.... You say this fellow Smith really is the goods—thinker, live wire—genuine national-importance sort of fellow?" he demanded.

"So his friends seem to think."

"Then what's simpler than for you to take a column in the Circus and say so? And then take another column and damn the other side? Pack of shirkers who bolted underground while your friend went up and kept the Hun off London? The old tricks are always the best—that's why they're old. Do it on general lines, of course; keep off sub judice cases and all that. As regards his being over London, you've got to make a molehill out of that mountain, if it is a mountain. What are the Regulations exactly?"

I told him what they were, not exactly, but in all their unavoidable inexactitude. At one of them he suddenly stopped me.

"Ah, there you are. A Secretary of State has power to except him, has he?"

"Hardly after the fact, I should say."

"Oh, don't be so dashed pedantic about it! Nothing would ever get done at all if everybody talked like that! I'm not suggesting this as his defense; it's his attack, so that he shan't be charged at all, don't you see? And if you know a better 'ole go to it.... Now you get those articles written. Write them so that they'll start correspondence. I don't quite see the Daily Circus being put in the cart by a Chelsea auctioneer. Then take a month's holiday.... Now tell me how the novel's going on."

This last I did over our second liqueur.