I quite realize that we can't all be Glenfields. I don't suppose it would do to have the world so over-oxygenated—for he is the oxygen as against the democratic nitrogen of our modern atmosphere. He was probably right in calling my scrupulous objections pedantic, but I confess that his power would affright me did I not trust him in the main to use it rightly. If he chose to send a note to a Secretary of State requesting that special permission for a civilian to be excepted from the Regulations should be given and slightly antedated, it was highly unlikely that he would be refused. That at any rate need no longer be a weight on my mind. As far as the Regulations were concerned Charles Valentine Smith had now probably very little to fear.

But was the contravention of the Regulations the real point of our Case after all? By keeping Smith out of Court were we not in reality making the larger issue quite dreadfully simple? Had Smith killed Maxwell any the less dead that certain strings could be conveniently pulled on his behalf? And why had Glenfield been so certain that my painter-friend, who twice had been on the point of taking the rest of us completely into his confidence, had now changed his mind, was "pulling out," and intended to tell us nothing at all?

On this point I was to receive still further mystification during that very week-end.

For, returning home that night, lighter of heart than I had been for many days, I found a small registered packet from Esdaile himself. The packet contained a key. His request, after Joan's house-and-servant-hunting commissions, was quite a modest one. He wanted me to go to his house, to post on to him a certain set of sketches the locality of which he minutely described, and then when I had a moment of time to go on to Dadley's, in the King's Road, and to ascertain for myself how he was getting on with the framing of a couple of pictures. He was sorry to bother me, but Rooke had behaved rather like an ass, and Mollie and the kids sent their love.

His commission was no bother to me; indeed, I found the latter part of it rather interesting. I had no desire to exchange further words with the "Chelsea Auctioneer," as Glenfield had described Westbury, but I confess that I had a curiosity about him. I had probably queered his pitch if he hoped to get Smith into Court on a technical point and then to fly off at score about bullets, pistols and pocket-patting at the foot of ladders; but I did not know what other means of making himself a nuisance he might not have. Old Dadley might be able to tell me. Dadley probably knew Inspector Webster as well.

But I could not now see Dadley till Monday, and as for the visit to Lennox Street, Sunday afternoon would do for that. Sunday morning I intended to spend in writing the first of those articles for the Circus. I went to bed, slept well, rose early, and was at my desk betimes.

Those two articles, and the numerous subsequent ones I wrote, need not detain us here. Indeed, just as you will have to take the legal aspects of our Case largely on Mackwith's word, so for the journalistic side of it I refer you to Lord Glenfield and his group of papers. But it is possible that you may remember something of the wave of opinion we set in motion, for it is not so very long ago. Deliberately I sought, and successfully obtained, correspondence—a correspondence that embraced, directly or obliquely, practically every side of the subject, from the personality of famous pilots to the constitution of the new Ministry of the Air. We have, of course, the general balance of our papers to consider, but within those limits I fairly let myself go. And if you tell me that I did all this to save Charles Valentine Smith from the hands of justice, I answer that I did it because ten short years have made the air and everything connected with it as important to us as the sea. If you tell me that I did it because I was Philip Esdaile's friend, I reply that I did it because I was just beginning to see on what a hair our destiny might hang if a new and gigantic industry, suddenly hung up in mid-career, should be left unsupported, unrecognized, unencouraged. If you charge me that I did it because of Joan and her happiness, I retort that I was by this time wholly convinced that Hay and Hubbard were right, that the next attack on one nation by another would come with appalling swiftness, would be directed at civilian nerves as much as at uniformed bodies, would be the beginning of the thousand years in which the Devil is to be unchained, and the sooner the public realized the situation the better.

So I wrote my first article, read it over, decided that it was pretty much what was wanted, and lunched lightly at home, as is my Sunday custom. Then, at about three o'clock, I put Esdaile's letter into my pocket and set out for Lennox Street.