But I could not honestly take the way out that Glenfield suggested. Over and above the burden that I shared with everybody else, I _had_ let my private affairs come between me and the work Glenfield paid me to do. The infernal Case had cramped itself on my shoulders and was making a slacker and a fraud of me. I wished that Glenfield had taken any way but this kindly one. There was only one answer to make to him. "Well?" he said at last. "Oh--let me send in my resignation," I growled. "I've let you down and will take the consequences." "Consequences my eye," he replied bluntly. "The drop's nothing--a thousand or two--we can pick that up in no time. It's you I'm worrying about, not the paper. You've something on your mind. What is it? I've a bit of a pull here and there, you know, and I may be able to help." To hear Lord Glenfield describe his appalling power as "a bit of a pull here and there" was almost comic; nobody living knows where his power ends. I consider it the most singular phenomenon of a democratic age that it gives to a few men such power as no ancient emperor ever dreamed of. Indeed, if one's conception of democracy is that it is the age's ailment, it seems to carry within itself hope of its own cure. Few men have been so bitterly attacked as Glenfield, but in my opinion he is the natural corrective to our new disease of numbers, our malady of stultifying votes. "Of course, I'm assuming it's a purely private affair," he went on. "Oh, it's public enough--or looks like being--that's part of the trouble----" "Yes?" he said invitingly.... V 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?"