"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."